Midjourney Medical, AI Talent Wars 2.0, Jake Paul Joins | Derek Thompson, Rene Haas, Robert Slaughter, Rob Reid, Thais Castello Branco, David Senra, Jake Paul & Geoffrey Woo

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Great mug.

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Apparently. I'm a little guy. But you know who's not? Ramp. Let me tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Say both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Midjourney pivoted to medical machines. It's not a pivot, it's an expansion. It's a second act, a third act for David Hull's fantastic entrepreneur, extremely inspiring entrepreneur. Maybe we should give some background on David Hull.

Wait, should we talk about the show today first?

Yeah, please.

Because this is the first time that Derek Thompson and Jake Paul have been on the same podcast. And I wanna just take a moment to just appreciate that because a lot of people said it would never happen. And they said it was impossible, that they were just—

We're going all over the place today.

Two different worlds, but we're bringing them together. Derek Thompson's kicking off our guest lineup today at 11:30.

Yeah.

You don't need an introduction there. We have Rene Haas from Arm, CEO, also on the board of SoftBank.

Very exciting.

And then we'll be closing it out with David Senra and Jake Paul at the end of the show. Beautiful.

Live in the TV pen, I'll turn it off. Anyway, yesterday Midjourney announced a new division of the company, an expansion, not a pivot, called Midjourney Medical. We'll watch the video, we'll go through the Midjourney scanner. Tyler was actually at the launch event, has some news to break it down. But first, let's kick it off with the history of David Holes because it's fascinating. Grew up in Florida, son of a dentist. Mm-hmm. He's not the dog walker. He's on team dentist over there. Son of a dentist.

We have a son of a dentist on our team.

We have a son of a dentist on our team. And played video games growing up.

Dentist cam. Dentist son cam.

Dentist son cam.

Look at those teeth.

Oh, wow.

Wow.

Wow, nepo teeth?

Nepo teeth.

He's got nepo teeth.

Go back, go back, cut back.

Look at that.

Big smile, big smile.

There we go.

He's got the nepo teeth. That's crazy.

That's crazy.

That's crazy.

Wow.

Your father really saved his best for you.

Born on third base with the teeth wide. It's crazy over there. Anyway, played video games as a kid, obviously, but starts hacking them, learns a little bit about computers, super intelligent, PhD in math track. I don't think he graduated, finished the PhD, but I mean, you know, at that level of engineering— He turned down. He turned down the PhD to go work at NASA, I think. So he's at NASA, eventually branches into entrepreneurship, starts Leap Motion, Pretty traditional venture-backed startup, raised money. I think Founders Fund was in at least one of the rounds, but it was a grind by all accounts. And so the first product brought hand tracking to VR. We should pull up a video of the original Leap Motion because there's some cool demos and you can see how it worked. And it's not actually that crazy to think about what we're gonna talk about today with the Midjourney medical scanner If you know the history of Leap Motion and some of the technology that was employed there, yes, this is a different use case, different product, very much bigger. But in terms of sensing, detecting, mapping, using algorithms, yeah.

Yeah, and so when David was talking about the backstory, he was kind of going through some of the technicalities of how the Leap Motion worked. And it was incredible, because he was like— I mean, this is early 20-teens, and he's using these deep neural nets. He said— It was a mixture of experts model. It was incredibly far ahead of the curve just on deep learning. And then it's just on this kind of weird side project. It's doing hand motion.

Yeah, everyone thought VR was going to take off. There was so much energy around Oculus and the dev community. But it was a tough— it was a very tough business. A lot of hardware challenges, much less mature supply chain. Everything's expensive. There's all these complex market dynamics with other big companies. Meta bought Oculus, Apple was investing heavily. Eventually Apple actually tried to buy David's first company, Leap Motion, but the deal fell through at the 11th hour. I think it actually happened twice. There was a reporting that like Apple had printed welcome packets to all of the Leap Motion employees being like, you're getting onboarded today. And then the deal fell through, which is crazy. You don't see that normally.

David turned it down.

He turned it down. There is some crazy reporting about like getting in and basically being like, "Ah, this is too corporate," or like, "This is not the vibe. We're not gonna be successful here." But, you know, one day he'll tell the story. But it was really rough for the company. They had to do layoffs. But they kept building and they sold devices to hackers. Yeah, look at this. The Leap Motion. This is— yeah, play Fruit Ninja. Now a lot of this stuff can be done with cameras and hand tracking. And the hand tracking on the modern VR device is pretty good just from the headset. Hand tracking in Apple Vision Pro, my favorite device, is fantastic. But at the time you needed a third-party device. So you had, can you scroll the video down to show the actual device a little bit?

Yeah.

Yeah, this little, like, it looks like a stick of gum. Very small, very neat, very cool. But ultimately very much a dev kit. Never got to, you know, mass consumer adoption like an Oura Ring or a Whoop Band or anything like that. It was not must-have for, you know, the average gamer, the average consumer, the average technologist. So after about a decade, David was able to take a step back and start hacking on the next thing, AI image generation. You know Midjourney, obviously, huge viral success, broke a lot of the traditional rules. So no venture funding, no front end, no website, no app. Like really, they, I mean, now they have a front end and stuff, but years went by where it was just a Discord. Everything was in a Discord and they scaled that Discord to millions of members, so huge that, the company Discord, I think it was the biggest, the Midjourney Discord was the biggest Discord for a while. They had to scale their systems at that company. But you're doing all this like off-balance sheet R&D basically. And on day one, you just get a fantastic mobile app for every device.

Social experience.

Social experience, that was the second thing, so yeah.

Yeah, because there was so much, this was the prompt engineering era, right?

Exactly.

Where people had their favorite prompts.

Yep.

It really helped kind of cultivate It was multiplayer on day one.

Yeah.

And so David has this quote, I think it's from him saying like, if you show someone a blank box and you tell them, hey, this is a magical AI machine that can generate you a picture of anything, people will just type in dog and they'll get a picture of a dog and they would get the same picture if they just went to Google Images. That's not what AI is actually interesting at. It's the astronaut riding a horse on the moon, the thing that that picture doesn't exist already. So it's you flying an F-16 in your hometown and like personalizing and doing something that would typically take a very large CGI budget or some sort of, you know, Photoshop master to actually whip up or collage together. You could do that with just one prompt. And so the multiplayer nature of Midjourney, when I jump into the Midjourney Discord, the first thing I see is your crazy prompt, your 12 levels deep, prompt injecting, thinking of different keywords, doing different SREFs for style references, doing all these different tweaks. And then I can just see, oh, he used this model and he specified these dimensions and he's getting really good results. So I'll take that, but I don't wanna make it about, I wanna make my images about a dog. You're a mosquito guy, so you're gonna make 'em about mosquitoes, right? And you can take my prompt and just sort of remix it.

And so that was really good. Some of the mosquito propaganda prompts I had back in those days. Were crazy.

Yeah.

Actually, I never ended up sharing them. They were simply too good.

Yeah, well, you lost the war and the mosquito's going away whether you like it or not. Google is focused entirely on killing mosquitoes apparently. Anyway, by generating 4 candidate images for each prompt, Midjourney got a bunch of really valuable data on what a correct image looked like for a specific prompt. This was another sort of Midjourney innovation. I don't know if they were the first ones to do this, but it was really key to the Midjourney flow. Instead of generating you an HD image, it would generate you 4 low-res images and you'd be like, "Ah, that has the right vibe, that has the right style, that has the right layout." And then it would get that feedback and be able to iterate at the same time. Stable Diffusion had some really good results, but it ran locally, it was open source, and so they weren't having the data flywheel like Midjourney was. Yeah. And so there were a lot of really positive things there. Now every company has a data flywheel and can, can iterate on that, but it was an important innovation. The company still that we know of hasn't taken venture funding. So I think David Holes owns most, if not all of the company. And after the big Meta deal to Vower Vibes, there's clearly enough cash flow to fund other projects. David's actually been talking about this for years, this idea of a medical device.

Yeah, the Meta deal, I don't think any specifics were ever released, but I think it's safe to assume it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Hundreds of billions, trillions potentially. Potentially.

Potentially, but enough to be able to take some really, really, really big swings and be able to have a balance sheet like a heavily funded private company.

Yeah, so it's really cool. I was hoping for a VR headset, honestly. I really wanted a VR headset.

I mean, this is just one of the hardware projects, right? He says like, I think there were like 8 little, you know, images. Teaser, okay. Yeah, teaser things. So there's a bunch more hardware.

Okay, because after the Apple Vision Pro launched, I think he put out some sort of review being like, "Ah, we're gonna have to do it ourselves," which I love. Anyway, let's play the Midjourney launch video for Midjourney Medical and see what's going on here in this 2-minute video. While we pull that up, I'll tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. The GOATs. The goat is still on screen. The goat is in our stream, not in the Midjourney. Did the aesthetics of this video carry through to the actual event experience? I only saw a few photos, but did the event have a nice vibe to it?

Yeah, it was very cool. They had similar like warm lighting everywhere. They had like kind of fake versions of the real machine. It's like way too big obviously to move around, but they had these kind of big tubes that like resembled it.

Then they had a smaller version you could put your hand in.

I did it. And my hand.

Interesting. Are you healthy? Is your hand healthy? We need you coding at all times, prompting.

I think it's hard because that was like a small demo version, so the resolution was lower. But someone else said that they figured out that they had some wrist thing because of boxing. Whoa.

Purple tunnel.

Yeah.

They found some issue.

You can just use an if statement for that, though.

In real time?

Yeah.

If San Franciscan. Then yes, carpal tunnel. Very cool vibes. I've always said this about Midjourney that I think when you, like, people debate, is AI art, art or whatever? I always think of Midjourney as a David Holes art experience. And I feel like you as the prompter are merely the museum goer in the museum of David and he is the one who is creating, and the Midjourney team is the curator. They're the artists, and you are experiencing the art through the prompts, but the decisions and the taste comes from David. And so are Midjourney images tasteful? I think they have taste. I think they have David's taste. And then there's the opportunity for a user to put a little bit more on top, but by default, I think the reason Midjourney has been successful is because it's so opinionated, and it's not trying to just be—

Yeah.

Stock photo generator.

Yeah, even this video was fully filmed by David.

Really?

Like, he was like the one holding the camera.

That's cool.

Yeah.

Ah, love this guy. It's amazing.

It makes me a little bit emotional. It's so cool.

Yeah.

It makes me feel like we're finally living in the future.

Emotions detected.

No one, no one, no one making this kind of device has ever been as cool as David Holt.

Sure.

Straight up. I'm willing to state that as a fact. It's just true. Like, this is not the first medical device product that we've talked about on this show.

Yes, but the medical device industry does not have aura.

Yeah.

They have no motion.

He's bringing motion and aura to medical, to the medical device field category.

Yes.

He's inventing medical devices.

Yeah, it's notable. Daniel in the chat is saying, how does this affect the portable MRI-YC company that we had a company on Tuesday. It's over for them. That is now competing with David Holes.

David Holes.

No, huge category. I think that David is going a different path. I think a lot of people are going to want to get these scans because it is a beautiful representation, futuristic representation of the human form. It's personalized.

Also, just never black pill on startups. Like, he could be so successful and he doesn't have any venture money and he's never gonna sell his business. And so you have like 12 biomedical device companies that are like, "We have to, we cannot get steamrolled by David Holes. We gotta work with this company. We gotta buy from that YC company." Like, the competitive dynamics of the market are always more complicated than just a single winner comes and steamrolls all the startups and all the incumbents. That's not how things ever play out. Life is more complicated. The economy is more complicated. Complicated. So never Black Belt. Do go to public.com though. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Let's play the deep technical dive, the technical deep dive. Did he make this music too, I wonder?

Yeah, and he also made this in, I think Blender, he said.

Whoa.

Like all the animations are all made by him.

By hand though?

He's the one person.

No AI?

I guess he's using Blender. For this, it's a great use case for Blender because you're cloning, you know, perspective.

I don't know if it was actually Blender. It was some 3D— I mean—

CGI stack.

Incredible music selection.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. There's words we should be reading. There's no voiceover, but we can kind of give you the summary here. The overviews— we'll start with something called We're going through— transducers act as speakers and microphones. Imagine a choir of 9,000 singers and an audience of 9,000 people all listening carefully. The transducers are controllable at a rate of 100 million times per second. Together, they fire in a pattern that sends out structured waves. Those are the structured waves you're seeing. The waves travel out at a speed of 1,481 meters per second. We construct a ring of 40 of these systems. 70 centimeters in diameter. The ring consists of 358,000 ultrasonic sensors. The chips take turns sending out waves. As the waves have a chance to dissipate, we fire the next one. One by one, they fire at a rate of up to 1,000 times per second. You're vibing out. The waves travel across the tank in 480 microseconds, about 1/2000th of a second. Hundreds of thousands of transducers listen. Each sensor resolves motions smaller than the width of an atom, not micrometers or nanometers, but picometers. Working together, hundreds of sensors can even push into the subatomic femtometer range. Finer than the scale of atoms, a scale where we don't even have anything you've heard of. The system captures data at a leisurely 17 gigabytes a second. Gigabytes of sonic reverberations flow around your body, and from vibrations, they form images with this device. Each probe sees different angles of your body, We combined hundreds of waves and thousands of sub-images to get the final product. Over 40 gigabytes of data moves through the system to just see one slice of your body. We analyze the images, making out organs, structures, and tissues. Of course, all good uses of AI. There you go. I'm not going to read all that. Here we show a slice of what we can see with 25 different biological structures. Look at this. We do this again and again and again as you move through the ring. So are you moving through the ring or is the ring moving around you?

No, no, you're moving down. The ring stays—

Oh, interesting.

That's why you saw in the video, it's a little platform you stand on.

Platform, interesting. Over a period of 60 seconds, the goal is to obtain several hundred slices of your body. Reconstructing across 21 servers with 2 petaflops of compute power and up to 806 terabytes of raw data. The slices form a 3D map with the ability to resolve internal tissue details as small as half a millimeter. Wow.

Limina Leap says, "Still can't believe they missed the Med Journey opportunity here." True.

Less than a dozen of these systems operating at full speed can do a full body scan of every— their goal is a fleet of 50,000 of these scanners capable of a billion scans a month. It's basically everyone on Earth.

Tyler, what's the logic of putting these, integrating these into spas? They want to make standalone spas or they want to make a first one in San Francisco that's like a flagship and then—

Yep.

I can't imagine all 50,000 scanners would— Come with a full spa, but—

Yeah, I think he said the plan was you start with the big one. I think there's gonna be like 10 or so in the first SF location. And then in some places there'll be like hundreds of these, some places there's like 1 or 2.

Yeah.

But I, yeah, I think that the spa is like mostly because at least he rationalized it because like, oh, you know, going to the clinic or whatever, it's like not a good experience.

Yeah.

This should be like very quick.

Yeah.

And it should feel much more like going to a, you know, sauna or steam room or whatever. Than going to the doctor. Because you can imagine you don't really need a doctor present during it, right? It's autonomous.

Well, they should create a bunch of needles in the ring that come in and just connect with you, deliver whatever peptides, hormones, PEDs that it deems necessary.

Potentially.

And kill.

Well, I mean, he also talked about this system is pretty overpowered, he said. So you could like theoretically, like instead of just like basically reading like what's going on in your body, you can like write stuff too, right? So you can like do non-invasive surgeries, whatever, by like beaming light.

Yeah, yeah, we always talk to folks who have done that where it's like it pulverizes the cancer or the tumor with ultrasonic waves.

Yeah, like think about like EUV lithography or something. If you like, you know, position the light in very certain ways, you can like actually make a change too, not just like read.

You're saying potentially we could pivot this into more chip fabrication capacity.

That would be a goal.

Ultimately. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, sorry, we can make way more money just making more chips.

Yeah, one of my—

We're gonna go to the data center.

Friends over on X, Antibology, great account, says, "The obvious next step once you have a full-body ultrasound scanner is to use the ultrasound to do useful things to the body. Delete tissues, make cells divide, reprogram cells, read plus write. If you're an engineer interested in solving the right side of sci-fi medical devices, we're building this and hiring." Well, let's go through some more of the reactions.

Midjourney launching an ultrasound scanner is such a clear example of freedom enjoyed by bootstrap companies that VC-backed companies would never have. Only time will tell if it's the right bet, but such bold bets require ownership and a kind of devil-may-care attitude. That's somewhat true, but the counter to all that is like the Elon Musk projects and a variety of founders.

And Spax.

—and SPACs, but also, you know, like Sam Altman has done this too, where it's like, okay, there's a new idea, get a new team, fund it, and it's on the side. Like, there are a variety of entrepreneurs that are playing the VC game, marshaling capital, and then have the permission to work on crazy stuff, like a mass driver on the moon, et cetera. But in general, I agree with this point, that a lot of founders get locked in a VC, loop of you gotta raise money every 18 months, you gotta hit the core KPI, you don't have the time or cash flow 'cause you're win, win, win, fight, fight, fight. And it's very, very interesting and such a narrative violation that Midjourney has become such a machine financially in, you know, people would say it's a commodity market, people would say it's a highly competitive market. You're going up against Google, you're with Nano Banana, you're going up against OpenAI. And yet Midjourney has carved out a fantastic community, a fantastic user base, fantastic business model, And it's really, I don't know, it's testament to something. It's just awesome. I don't know what else to say, but not everyone loves it. They're quoting Kanye West. I like David Hull's AI art tool, but what does he know about medical equipment? He knows about this because of Leap Motion. Like just say you don't—

Well—

—study history.

Also very important, he's partnered with Butterfly Network, which is a public company that is of course up almost 50% today.

Really? Wow.

They're providing futures. Quick history on Butterfly. Let's see. Started in 2011 by Dr. Jonathan Rothberg. And yeah, fast forward to 2021, they were SPAC'd, and then they've kind of just kind of floundered a little bit in the public market since then. But have clearly developed some pretty impressive technology. And so interesting way to combine, you know, Midjourney's and David Hall's vision with like technology that's been in development for a long time.

Yeah. Oh, this is interesting. Calling back to Rune. Rune says the vaguely PBS Kids inspirational tone that new AI release videos take has stopped being appropriate, I think. This is no longer like Carl Sagan explaining the rings of Saturn. There's something more "Dark techno Promethean about it, Faustian even. Needs a 1otrix Loptian score." I don't know how to pronounce that. P. Sure, he's for sale. Rivers is saying, "Midjourney's the first AI lab to score their release with something beautiful and so much more. Incredibly beautiful song from Max Cooper. I would guess people underestimate how much it stirs their soul." It rose, certainly rose your emotions. You were excited by it. People were very, very positive. Hank Green offered some context on other initiatives and whole body ultrasounds. We don't have time to read through all of it, but it's in the newsletter as well if you want to check that out. tbpn.com, we link to it. You can go check it out.

Paula says, okay, Midjourney, now make my spine more Studio Ghibli.

I'm down.

I'm down.

Ghiblify. The human form.

Yeah, I think one of my main takeaways is like, okay, now we have this new method. Ideally you can find cancers much faster, right? If you're going to this thing every week or so, you can find cancers earlier. So then like, how do you react to this? Like, well, now we have this—

Go long housing, because if the boomers don't die, they won't pass it down.

Well, yes, but also we have this joke like, oh, you're not AGI-pilled if you're not smoking every day, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So it's like, this is like very, this is like great evidence like, yeah, you should start smoking now, right?

Because it's gonna be smoking. Do not start smoking. Do not start smoking. But yes, it does fit in perfectly with this.

Like risk of lung cancer is effectively zero.

It also tells you a lot about like the whole pitch of like AI is gonna cure cancer. It's like people tend to think that like AI is gonna cure cancer by like the prompt being like, what's the cure for cancer? And it's gonna give you some like E equals MC squared math equation when really it's like AI might cure cancer in the sense that like, A guy gets really rich from AI image generation and then funnels that into a medical technology that can advance screening by a couple months and catch it earlier. So the rate of cancer declines a bunch. But it's not just like, oh yeah, he prompted it and got, we got the magic pill. It's much more complicated than that because curing cancer or actually reducing cancer rates is like a process. It's like an industrial process more than it is like one neat trick.

And do you remember what happened on March 21st back in 2024?

March 21st, 2021? 2024.

2024.

Oh, was he posting about this?

Yeah, David said, "TBH, I want to open up a medical imaging division at Midjourney to work on stuff like this." That's so cool.

Called a shot and here it is. Did it. Very exciting. Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. What did Noam Shazeer see? What did he, what did he see? Because Noam Shazeer, the legendary AI researcher formerly of DeepMind, has joined OpenAI. Very exciting news for Noam and OpenAI. He says, I'm excited to share that I'll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there. It was a difficult decision to move on. I'm incredibly proud of the amazing team at Google and everything we've built together. It has been an honor and a pleasure to work with all of you Everyone is very, very excited about this. And Yaxin shows some interesting details here.

He says, "Noam Shazeer is 6'4"." I don't know if that's true, but— Just getting right to the important stuff.

But I like that we're apocryphally building up our heroes.

Yeah, remember the Metis List?

Number one on the Metis List.

You remember the Metis List, which we released summer of last year during the height of the talent wars?

Co-author of the Transformer T5 Switch Transformer papers, one of the pioneers of sparse MoE models. He's leaving his VP of Engineering Gemini co-lead role at Google DeepMind to join OpenAI. Lisan Al-Ghaieb says, "This is likely the most significant AI talent move of the year. It makes you wonder what's going on at Google." Only matched by the next day, Dean Ball joins OpenAI. Tyler, you've been at Ball Nowhere for a long time. We've had him on the show multiple times.

I know Ball.

We love Dean and he's been in the complete opposite, camp. He's not an AI researcher, he's policy, a lot of experience there and had a really even keel, I think, on a lot of the analyses of should something be—

I think the main thing is he really cares about getting this right as a country.

Totally.

Right. And he's been critical of almost every company in space, but only again, because he cares. What does Jim Cramer think about these moves? Yeah. He posted at 3:00 AM this morning, Noam Shazir, top AI thinker, goes to AI from Google. Big win for AI.

And drop the O, drop the Open, just AI.

It's cleaner.

It's cleaner.

There's closed source models anyway. Just call it the AI company, I guess. In other news, Riley Walls did it. He did the unthinkable. He bought a street in San Francisco and auctioned it off and Notion bought it. And now the Notion Way is officially born. I'm so happy that Notion won this. It could have been, you know, some crypto thing. It could have gone so odd. You know, it's like high risk. Whenever you turn something loose like this on the internet, it can go a bunch of different ways. Notion way is not something that I think would be annoyed. I personally wouldn't be annoyed if like a street corner in my neighborhood was Notion way. It is an ad, but— It's a good ad. It's a term.

Well, you certainly wouldn't be annoyed.

You'd be thrilled. But it's just a term that feels like it could just be a street name, not something that just feels totally like an ad, like with a .com in there or something. So fantastic.

Yeah, I remember when—

Riley Walls.

Perfect execution from Riley Walls. I remember talking with him about this idea for the first time. Absolutely loved it. We told him like—

They painted the street too.

We told him that we would backstop it, Basically, like, if no one bid on it, then we would—

Yeah, we were like, we're good for like $1,000 or something like that.

No, I think it was like—

Maybe $10K or whatever the cost was.

I remember it was like $20K, $20-something.

But we were like, well, we'll backstop it. We'll be like the buyer of last resort if you need that.

And winning bid was $140K. Wasn't necessary at all.

Very, very interesting.

They get the blessing of the mayor.

Yeah, yeah.

Daniel Lurie.

That's very exciting. Very exciting. So go check it out if you're in San Francisco. Go to the Notion Way. And you can also walk on the beautiful mural, which turned out fantastically as well. Like, faith in humanity restored here. A street in San Francisco painted with what is effectively anonymous internet graffiti, and yet everything looks very inoffensive, very beautiful. It collages very well together. I think it looks good. I was worried about that too. I was like, Ah, if somebody just paints it in, even if it's just chaotic, messy colors, that's just not fun to have next to you. But this looks like a beautiful quilt of patchwork of interesting designs. This feels like everyone that participated took it seriously and wound up with a really great result here. So good news for everyone involved. Good news for Riley Wallace. Our next guest is here, but what do you want to talk about?

Before we go to our next guest, Aiden Gomez accidentally became important at work.

I love Aiden Gomez. Can we get him on the show?

Ruining his life. We haven't had enough death grips fans on the show. Just scroll down, send us memes quoting really funny things to post from.

Also on the Transformer paper, by the way, Aiden Gomez, they call him Aiden Goatmez for a reason. He's goated. No, I love him. He's fantastic. And he did a podcast episode with 20 BC wearing a Death Grips t-shirt, and that was incredible. Anyway, a bunch of other funny things happening at the G7. Apparently Donald Trump had to ask Sam Altman how to adjust his chair up and down, how to use the chair. And that's gotta hurt because you're Sam Altman, you've spent billions, tens of billions of dollars, years of your life, a decade of your life building a machine that can answer this exact question.

Almost any question.

You take a picture of the chair, it tells you how exactly to operate it.

So to do that right in his face.

Right in his face.

Just completely reject the premise.

Yeah, yeah. And you know, you know, on the tip of the tongue, he's like, Actually, like, this is a great opportunity to use ChatGPT. You can use images, upload a photo of that chair. It can go and agentially pull the actual diagrams, the manual from that chair. It's chair super intelligence. It's chair super intelligence.

Mr. President.

And Mr. President is just not interested. He's just like, "I'm going with a human on this one." And that's why diffusion takes so long. That's why we're in the slow takeoff. Anyway, we have Derek Thompson, co-author of "Abundance," host of "Plain English," reporting writer at The Atlantic. Derek, how you doing?

Good, man, how are you guys doing?

We're doing fantastically. Welcome to the show.

I'm talking chairs. This is cutting-edge technology. This is what I want.

Do you care much about chairs? Are you the kind of guy who like obsesses over—

Are you a chair maxer? Are you optimizing your ergonomic working space?

I noticed there's no—

No.

There's no—

No neck support.

Some people could be sitting at school chairs.

No, no, no, no, no, you gotta keep the neck strong. I'll say this, I remember, I was in London when I was 18 years old, and my best friend and I went there after we graduated from high school. And we went to like all the museums and we were looking at like all this like old British shit. And I remember seeing this chair that claimed to have been made in like, my God, it was like 500 AD, BC. And I remember thinking in that moment, it's kind of crazy that chairs have always looked like chairs. Like, is that a stupid conclusion or is that like— like, is it— like, chairs have always looked exactly like chairs. We haven't really changed the general contour of the chair. There's something about just like the shape of the body that's like, okay, well, the chair just— like, chairs just have to look—

Is this beanbag erasure?

What do you have wrong with big beanbag? I think beanbags are like a cul-de-sac in the history of chair innovation, right? Like, we went in the direction of beanbags and then We got up.

We actually have a friend who has a beanbag company.

From an industrial standpoint, we collectively got up from the beanbag and left it. I think we've tried it.

In the couple of times. You've seen those setups where you're basically reclined and you're in like a globe.

Yeah, it has the screens here and then it leans you back.

That's what I'm saying. Why don't we have more chairs that look like circles, right? That's all I'm saying. We've got chairs that look like chairs that are shapes that aren't just this thing that's been the shape of the chair now for thousands of years. I feel like we did that. Like we've done chairs that have— those classic right angles. It's time to, you know—

This is a big time to reinvent the chair.

Reinvent the wheel.

Reinvent the wheel too. I mean, this is a big stagnation thesis thing where it's like, where's the new umbrella? Like, there's like, we, like, even not just—

But it's even been Tyler Cowen traveled to the UK and he looked at 3,000-year-old chairs and he was like, that looks like a fucking thing I could buy from IKEA today. Is stagnation a thing? And then— Suddenly it's the word on all of our lips.

Yeah, anyway, you know what country is not stagnating? They clearly read Abundance, it's North Korea. North Korea built 10,000 new homes in Pyongyang just last year. That's more than Los Angeles or Chicago. Did you airdrop Abundance to North Korea? Like, are you behind this? What's going on? Leaflets.

Leaflets.

There's a lot of conspiracy theories out there about, all the various people that are bankrolling Abundance. I haven't heard the North Korean dictator conspiracy theory of Abundance. I have not spoken to Kim Jong-un, and un, thank you. I haven't spoken to that administration.

But have you looked through the newsletter? Have you checked your Substack? Have you checked your Substack? No, I haven't.

Give us the link.

Where can people sign up if you're a dictator in a foreign country and you wanna get the latest?

I, all right, well, I know exactly what I'm doing after this 30 minutes is over. Okay. Is I'm going straight to— You gotta turn on crypto. Search by whatever the sort of, the @surname is for North Korean website domains. Yeah. I'll do that immediately, yeah.

Okay, staying on abundance more seriously, has there been any uptake from American legislators politicians at the local, state, federal level? Because when Abundance dropped, it felt like this is potentially a book that's gonna be the foundation of a new political platform, and people are gonna— are gonna be running on this and quoting from this. And I'm interested to know if there's been little pockets of action where someone's taken an idea and actually tried to implement it. Maybe it hasn't passed yet, but you can see the— the gears are turning.

Yeah, I mean, the way that I think I put it on Ezra's show when we did a sort of like 1-year retrospective on Abundance is like, you know, and other people can disagree, and I'm interested if you disagree, I feel like at the level of nomenclature and vibes, like what one wants from a book, right? You spend a year essentially in isolation hoping that the ideas that you come up with in a dark little room end up infecting a discourse of millions of people live outside of that room that you'll never meet. And from that standpoint, people talk about abundance for better or worse. The concept of an abundance liberal makes sense to people who are both abundance liberals, who are conservative, who are on the socialist left. There is an understanding of what the term means, and that is its own kind of memetic success. So you have that layer of memes, right? And that's not what you asked about. You asked about real-world outcomes. And there, I think the record is— I would have to say honestly, it's mixed, right? Right. If you were looking for the individual, the elected individual who was the sort of ascendant political talent associated with abundance, it's not entirely clear to me that that person exists in a way that everybody on, say, an abundance group text would name the same person, right?

Sure.

Obviously there's aspects of people to judge that are abundancy. Gavin Newsom signed a law called the Abundant and Affordable Homes Near Transit Act. Like, he not only— signed a law that had abundance ideas in it, making it easier to build houses in downtown areas, especially around transit, making it easier to build clean energy without passing through all sorts of NEPA hopscotch efforts.

Sure.

He not only signed it, he named it after the book. So there are success stories like that, and there are absolutely governors like Hochul in New York who I think are not only doing abundancy things, but also kind of flying under the radar and how much they're trying to press forward the policy agenda. On the one hand, like, those examples exist. And at the same time, I think that in politics, because what gets attention is not just law, it's people, there is a sense that what abundance needs is its champion on a public stage, its elected champion or presumed-to-be-elected champion on the public stage. And I think that's where, you know, when you write a book, All you control is the book. I can't write a book and make a person. And so I don't know who that person necessarily is yet, but there's a lot of possibilities. And the last thing I would say is this.

Why not you?

There's no fucking way I'm running for office. No way. A couple things. I'm very short. And I think that especially in a telegenic age, I don't think short people can win national elections.

What about post-Klav era though?

What about leg extension? Leg extension.

And then I gotta look at a leg extension. Okay, see, now we're talking leg extension and I gotta bring my wife into this. I'm not entirely sure that I wanna be like, you know, laid low by whatever kind of recovery process is happening.

It looks really bad when I see the video.

Yeah, but you settle down for abundance too.

Sure, okay.

Can we just pause on, before I answer your question seriously, can we pause on leg extension? Do you know people who weren't in the movie "Materialist" who got actual leg extensions, like in the real world?

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. I have somebody that I suspect.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. We actually do know. Someone and you can see it in their gait.

How can you see it in their gait?

They walk a little bit like this. You know it when you see it. You know it when you see it.

It doesn't look fluid, it doesn't look athletic anymore, and they're like 4 inches taller than they used to be.

Do you think overall this person would say, "I'd do it all over again," or would they say, "I fucked up my gait and I can't run"?

Probably.

Okay. Because for a lot of lifestyles, I mean, it's like skipping leg day. It's the more extreme version of skipping leg day. It's only doing leg day.

Yeah, permanently skip leg day, but you gain—

But in many social interactions, shoulder, like the shape of your shoulders, like is your chest filled out? Even like the bicep when you shake someone's hand, that's going to be a more recognizable sign of strength and athleticism than— Are your quads in shape so that you could do a box jump? Because in a meeting, in a business context, or even at a bar, or even at a concert, like, you're not presented with an opportunity to show off your explosive leg development, but you can show off your biceps or your shoulders.

I would almost say that in some ways, given how important clips are, podcasts, et cetera—

Oh, this is—

There's actually an opportunity more than any point in the last 50 years to become the short king president.

This is the year to show us.

James Madison was 5'4". Shortest US president.

5'4" and like 95 pounds. Like, James Madison was like Prince. I mean, Prince was like Shaq compared to James Madison. It is crazy.

And so I'm just saying like—

That's the shortest US president.

I'm just saying like you on a generational podcast tour, you're never, your podcast, you're sitting down. I can't tell right now. You could tell me you were, you know, Jon's height and I could believe it.

All right, 5'8", but we're gonna shut the door on me running for president or running for any kind of public office 'cause that is never, ever, ever happening. But the last thing I would say seriously on the topic of abundance in American politics is this. It's not lost on me that if you look at some of the more public elections across the country, Democratic Socialists are— they won mayor in New York City.

Yeah.

There's a former/DSA-associated candidate who's in the runoff in Los Angeles. A DSA candidate just won the Democratic primary in Washington, D.C. Democratic Socialists just won in Seattle. So there's a way in which you can say looking across the country like, wow, like socialists are really having a moment in American cities. But something interesting is happening like behind the scenes, which is that I've either spoken to or spoken to like meeting advisors for all these people. Like I've spoken to Mamdani personally. I know people who are on his housing council, have met with and been at events with the mayor of Seattle. And like there's ways in which I think abundance is winning arguments behind the scenes, even if the people that we see elected are like, what's the headline? Democratic socialist Zoran Momdani, like, won the mayoral election in New York. And so there's a way in which I think optimistically, you could say abundance is killing lots of people, even if the general public wouldn't identify those people as abundance liberals.

Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think that there's been some consensus that like the aesthetically socialist has tacked to more of like the abundance agenda when elected, because maybe that's just more pragmatic, maybe there's more of an alliance there that people thought— you spar as you lead up to the election, and then when you get in, you're more pragmatic, which I think is probably good for everybody.

What's the old Cuomo line? You campaign in poetry, govern in prose? Yeah, if, you know, if campaign in populism, govern in abundance turns out to be the reality for certain Democrats, that's certainly not like the worst and darkest possible timeline.

The North Korea way. Just kidding. You're not gonna endorse that. Campaign on complete authoritarianism and run on abundance. No, self-enhancement, America's cult of self-enhancement. There's been, it feels like Clavicular really like broke through to the mainstream and introduced a little bit of this, but how have you processed the latest run of that? Of this because self-enhancement's been going on forever. Like what's new, what's now, what sparked your recent essay on it? Like why did you wanna write about it at this moment in time?

Well, look, it's just a lot of things are happening at once. A lot of things are happening at once. And I wanted to draw a circle around these things and try to name it, right? You've got the looksmaxing phenomenon of clavicular width, which, you know, there's a way in which I almost see that as a microwave that's crested. Like clavicular, I bet, like Google Trends is not exactly on the right side that mountain. Yeah. But you think about like peptide stacking, you think about GLP-1s, which are going to go crazy when retatrutide, the third-generation GLP-1 drug from Eli Lilly, comes out. You think about the fact that TRT, testosterone replacement therapy, is going berserk, that preventative plastic surgery like Botox is getting younger and younger in terms of its average age of user. You look at the fact that according to both the American Time Use Survey and gym associations, the number of people people who are members of gyms is at an all-time high. And the amount of time that people self-report working out every week is also at its highest level in any period in American history. Like, something's clearly happening in terms of America's changed relationship with health. It's almost as if health itself, which used to live— or has in various periods of American sort of cultural history lived a little bit outside of pop culture is now becoming like an integral part of culture itself. And I'm really interested in this for a couple reasons. I'm interested in what drives it. I'm interested in its extremes and people like Bryan Johnson who say, "Not only do I wanna like live longer and be healthier, my goal is to not die at all." But I'm also interested in what it does to us like as people, how it changes our relationship to our bodies. So just two observations here. One is that I have an Oura Ring. Mm-hmm. Right here. I like it. I think it's improved my health, it's improved my fitness, and it's helped me sleep better. But I also sometimes can't help fall into this relationship with my Oura Ring where I am making decisions about my daily activity to optimize my Oura Ring scores rather than to do things that can't be measured. So if I have a really good time with a friend at 9:30 PM, that can't be measured in my Oura Ring data.

Mm-hmm.

There's no dashboard I can look at on my phone and say, I had a really good time with my friend and he appreciated my presence. But like the Oura Ring will say, you stayed up too late and now your HIV sucks. So I think there's ways in which sometimes these technologies, this sort of biometric dashboard we can build for ourselves, replaces the hard question of how should I live with the easy question of what should I optimize that is observable, right? Make number go up. It's a little bit of, of Jordi Hays' law. Make number go up, precisely. So that's one thing I'm interested in. But the other thing I'm interested in that I think might be— certainly, I think of your audience as being the bullseye of this. Let me get at this from a kind of weird angle. Alfred Chandler is an historian who wrote a book called The Visible Hand about the invention of managerial capitalism in the 19th century. And he said what happened is the telegraph and the train created enormous information flows that couldn't be managed by 18th-century corporations. And so we had to invent this job to manage those information flows. And the name of that job was the middle manager. And so it was the telegraph and the train and the profusion of information that was created by the speed of products moving around the country that created the need for managerial capitalism. In a similar way, I think biometric capitalism, as you can think of it, creates the need for individuals to essentially serve as the chief executive of the self. We are faced with all of this data about what we're doing every day, how we're sleeping, how much calories we're burning, what our VO2 max is, how much zone 2 time we spent training yesterday. And what role does overseeing all this information cast us in? It casts us in the role of the manager, just like in the 19th century. And so in a way, I think when I say our approach to health is changing things that are, you know, more complicated than just, "Oh, everyone's talking about health these days," I do think it changes our relationship with the body to essentially assume this role of like the CEO of the self. And finally, and I'll stop, it changes our relationship to leisure too. Because typically in a sort of traditional setup, you go to work and you think about being productive and then you leave work and you have downtime and you don't think about downtime being productive until you can see on your dashboards exactly how you spent that downtime. How did you sleep? How did you, did you, how much VO2 time did you spend? Excuse me, how much zone 2 time did you spend during your workout? So suddenly this productivity mindset that used to be contained to work is now leaking into our downtime as well and getting us to think about, again, our bodies as this kind of machine that we are— in which we are cast in the role of a CEO to optimize. I just think that's like an interesting way that we're alive today. I think it's just interesting to think about how our experience of life is different than in previous decades. And I think— I think that these trends in health do make the experience of life different than it used to be.

Did you see the Nat Friedman talk where he describes using OpenClaw and an AI agent to monitor his water intake? And it uses cameras, which apparently he has inside of his house, which is not very common. Most people have security cameras outside. He has cameras inside his house and it saw, it told him, "Go to the sink and drink a glass of water right now." He did it and then it sent him a message saying like, "Good boy," basically. And it's just very funny because in that scenario, it's like he's not even the CEO of his life anymore. He's like, he's like the line worker. Yeah, well, he's, he's, he, he, he's delegated the job of the CEO to the, to the AI that then just tells him like, you have to go to the gym. He doesn't even make the decision.

I would say he's a very modern CEO.

Oh, okay.

Like surely you guys have talked with all these people about how like the modern executive or modern manager's job is sandwiching, right?

Yeah.

So it's like you give the large language model or whatever AI system it is, you are the, you're the bottom. Layer of the sandwich. You give the AI model an input.

Yeah.

And then it gives you an output and then you act on that output. Yeah. So you are the bread that is sandwiching the work of the AI model. It seems to me without talking to, you know, Nat in this particular case, that's what he's doing. He is, he decided, I'm going to design a technological system to optimize my water intake.

Yeah.

He designed that system and now he's on both sides of it.

Ah, interesting.

So in a way, I think he is acting as a very modern chief executive, even using this sort of, AI sandwiching function.

Yeah, I was talking yesterday or maybe the day before on the show around when I was, I got to a point when I was probably 19 or 20 that I felt I was using up all of my executive function budget on my own health, right? I'd wake up, I would have a protein shake, I would go to the gym for 2 hours, I would sauna, I would have like the perfect breakfast. And I was like cramming all of this like really high effort activity into this period before 9 AM when I had ultimately, coming out of that, had accomplished like nothing that actually moved my life forward, right?

Yeah.

I could have just like gone around and like walked a couple miles and it would have had the same sort of impact on my life. And I think that that is, that's certainly a trap that I think I think you could argue that a huge amount of the world is falling into right now, or at least, certainly in Los Angeles and California, New York, coastal cities where, how much of your intelligence are you putting into something just to make modern life bearable, right? Just to make sending the 5, just so you have enough energy to send the 5 emails a day that really matter. Yeah. Move your work forward.

I just think like some people are certainly in that camp, but then there's the other side of it, which is like the optimization is this game that is rewarding in and of itself. And so it's the min-maxing, the maxing is enjoyable in the same way that you can max out stats in a video game or even in business or optimize whatever, but people enjoy these optimization games. So I'm not certain surprised to see that people get the enjoyment today from optimizing a life that they never really put to use. They might have the most incredible athletic performance. Are they ever gonna go out and hunt a deer with their bare hands? No, but they— Yeah. But like the process of maxing was what was satisfying to them.

Well, the word game, I think, is apt here. And it's funny that in this case, to extend the metaphor, the game board is, the body that we're playing on. The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, who was on my show a few months ago, had this lovely line where he said, "I used to think that there was no difference between a goal and a purpose in a game. But then I realized that if you're playing a board game with friends, the goal is to win, but the purpose is to have fun." Yeah. So the goal is the thing that's measurable. The purpose is the thing that might be ineffable, but it's more important, right? To win but not have fun is an experience that on reflection, a minute later, an hour later, a day later, you're going to regret. And so I do— writing this essay is a part of my trying to reconcile an experience that's very much like the one Jordi described, where on the one hand, I do want to optimize my health. I don't want to die early.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, On a personal note, both my parents died of cancers when I was in my 20s. So when, you know, they didn't live to see, to meet my wife, they didn't live to meet my sister's husband, they didn't dance at our weddings. And so I am not one of these people who looks at folks like Bryan Johnson or Andrew Huberman and says this obsession with health and life extension, it's inhuman. It's like, no, what's inhuman, what's truly terrible is the premature death that means that my daughter knows her grandmother as a photograph rather than as a grandmother.

Mm-hmm.

That's terrible. So, this is progress. The focus on health is progress. But I do think it's just worth pointing out that this generation of personal, individuated health obsession is not like other generations of health movements in American history. The Prohibition movement, the Temperance movement, a movement in the 19th century in the UK that I learned about called Muscular Christianity, which was basically just what it sounds like, New Testament values, huge biceps.

El Segundo.

El Segundo.

Those were movements about national change.

Okay.

Love 'em or hate 'em, they were trying to change the world. When you're playing,— a self-optimizing game around like getting those Oura numbers.

It's individual.

The only game you're playing is to raise the numbers for yourself. And that's an important distinction.

Well, yeah, I do wonder if this health obsession will further reduce the birth rate.

I was about to transition to that, yes.

Phones are clearly like cigarettes for your mind, you know, like they're— They're not, they're certainly, they have some utility just like a cigarette does. A cigarette can kind of make you relaxed or a little bit focused, whatever it is, but it's certainly bad for you overall.

Yeah.

Phones seem to be bad for a number of reasons. And I do think it's funny, you know, like biohacking and, you know, making the number go up is like totally at odds with like, parenting in so many ways. Like you could be, I'm on a 6, like you'll never meet a parent that has children under 5 that's like, oh yeah, 5 nights back to back.

My youngest daughter's 6 months old. So let's not even talk about my poor sleep schedule for the last 6 months.

Yeah, so I had a, but that's not the purpose.

A friend of ours texted, a friend of ours texted us over the weekend and said, after having a kid, it's just so funny to think about single people taking a vacation to unwind. Unwind from what, sleeping in? No, but I do, but you know, when you think of, and I think back to the Stephen Bartlett viral moment where he's talking about, you know, having a couple glasses of wine.

The drink he got that knocked him out for 3 days, yeah.

And just thinking like, wow, like parenting is gonna be really rough for someone that gets that thrown off from, from a couple drinks because you don't really get to decide. From midnight to 2:30 AM, you might be up like 3 times a week. And like people have built their lives so that that never happens.

Yeah, yeah. No, I remember I was interacting with some tweet from, I don't remember if it was Bryan Johnson or someone else sort of of that ilk. And they were talking about all the various things in life, staying up a little too late, flying across time zones that had some effect on their cardiometabolic data. And I said, you know, there's, there's a version of this approach to life that is literally anti-human. Because imagine doing this analysis of childbirth. You know what happens when you have a 1-month-old at home? I mean, you, you actually do, because you were citing it. Your sleep goes to shit. You don't see people the same way you used to, so your social life goes down. You eat like crap. The risk of depression, anxiety, even postpartum psychosis skyrockets. Like if you just looked at the biometric data of new parents and your only attitude in life was make number go up, you would have to conclude, you would have to conclude that having children is horrendous for the human race. But like life is complicated. And yeah, the other thing— Psychologists—

You've seen the data that shows that I think women that have of kids, you know, later in their 30s are much, live longer, like significantly longer.

This is where I was getting. So the psychologist Darby Saxbe had this really interesting point in her new book, "Dad Brain," where she pointed out that new parent brains tend to suffer trauma when their kids are born. But if you look at parental brains decades later, they tend to have more neural connections and they tend to be richer. And in fact, there's been research done out of Northwestern University that found that so-called super-agers, people in their 80s and 90s, that have the memory of someone in their 50s and 60s. The thing that correlates most strongly with being a super-ager and having great, great attentional capacity and memory in those later years is social connection, which evolutionarily makes kind of sense. Like, maybe early memory, early language was just for gossip before we were, you know, inventing calculus and artificial intelligence. And so it would make sense that the strongest brains were the brains designed to keep track of who in the tribe was nuts and who in the tribe was helpful and who was an asshole and who was kind. And so I think it's, if you're going to think about this scientifically, if you're going to go the science route to sort of science your way toward a theory of the purpose of life, like pay attention to the whole body of research and don't just look at the dashboard on your phone because that's capturing such a tiny, tiny amount of the bigger picture.

Yeah, I completely agree. We gotta do this more often. I agree. This is so much fun.

Needed more time.

We needed more time, but thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you for taking the time.

I'll see you guys.

Have a great rest of your week.

Have a great weekend.

Thanks.

And we'll talk to you soon.

Have a good one. Cheers.

Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. Our next guest is the CEO of Arm Holdings, René Haas. His first time on the show, but we're very excited to have him on to talk about expanding the Arm's business beyond the CPU IP that they're known and loved for. Everyone's used an ARM-based CPU for one thing or another, probably everything in their life, but now they're getting into chipmaking and designing their own chips. ARM partners have shipped more than 350 billion chips. That is so many. More than 22 million developers build on the ARM platform. Rene has been with ARM since 2013. So very interested to hear about his journey over the last 13 years. You have to imagine this is the most exciting moment in probably his entire career, certainly the Arm story, but we'll bring him into the TVP and Ultradome and ask him directly. Rene, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. I'm doing fine. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Oh, my pleasure. Yeah, thank you. I'm doing well. How are you both doing?

We're doing—

Doing great.

Fantastically. It's an incredibly exciting time.

And shout out to your team. This audio-video setup is perfect. We talk to a lot of people. People like to go hard visually, make something that looks great, but then they'll miss the audio. You did both quite well. So I appreciate it.

Yeah, fantastic team.

We have a great team here. We hijacked a conference room and turned it into a little mini studio here. So glad to see it's paid off.

I love it.

Perfect.

Yeah, I mean, we were just reflecting on the fact that I mean, it's an exciting time for us. We cover the news, we cover AI. There's so much going on. You've been with Arm for 13 years, is that correct? That's right, yep. Is this the most exciting year? Is this the most exciting moment of your career? Is this, how else are you contextualizing like what it means to be in this particular moment?

Gosh, I would say, you know, having been in the tech industry my entire career, it's probably the most exciting time. Yeah, I would agree. I mean, artificial intelligence and the idea of machines that can think like humans, I mean, that's Star Trek type stuff. So, if you grew up watching science fiction, and I remember, I think one of the very first movies my dad took me to was 2001: A Space Odyssey. We're kind of living that life now. And, it's one of those things I know my compatriots have said the same that you knew it was coming, but you didn't know if you'd had a chance to work on it in your lifetime. So, yeah, so it's amazing.

Yeah, yeah, now it's here. Talk to me about how you process the AI boom. There's been a couple of distillations of the progress. You have the ChatGPT moment, the reasoning moment, the coding agent moment. As each of those moments happened, how did your business change? How did your perception of the AI boom change? And then at what point did you realize that you needed to expand the strategy, change the strategy, How deliberate were you along the last 3 years, 4 years, as we've seen these sort of tectonic shifts in the capabilities of AI systems?

Yeah, one of the things, you know, in our industry that has been almost like a force that you cannot stop is the need for more storage or more memory or more compute, right? There's just something, whether it's an end application, a new product that just drives that, that need. AI is almost the monster that can eat almost unlimited amount of memory, unlimited amount of storage, and unlimited amount of compute just simply because of the raw amount of computation that's required, the amount of data that's needed, the amount of intelligence that you're generating in the tokens, et cetera, et cetera. So, what we've seen over the last just number of years, as everyone in our industry is this sudden huge tailwind of how much is enough? And we don't seem to be hitting that point yet. And I was at— I was in Computex a couple of weeks ago and met with folks in the industry. And I remember talking to some of the guys at TSMC, and they said, we've never seen a cycle where it's this good for this many years. Yes. Something's got to change. But we've never quite seen artificial intelligence at the level we're seeing it. And it's still— feels very, very early. I know a lot of people say that in the sense of, to your point, the ChatGPT moment, the Claude Code moment, the co-work moment. But still there's lots and lots of industries that haven't even scratched the surface. So it's still amazingly, even given all the tailwinds, still seems very, very early.

I can intuit or at least guess at what the crunch at TSMC feels like. It's incredible demand from every supplier, sharp elbows from probably everyone who's trying to get line time and a lot of people working late nights, making sure that the machines are running, that the fabs are, you know, delivering at high quality consistently. But what is the shape of a crunch at Arm during a boom like this? Is it different? And then I imagine, maybe take me through what the next couple years will look like and how different pieces of the business will scale to react to different bottlenecks, different opportunities, different supply, you know, just demand increasing broadly?

Yeah, so it's a very, very important question because it's changed a bit for us. When we were seeing all of this growth in demand in the prior years or in previous growth periods, we would feel the crunch in terms of our end customers saying, we're limited by this, we're limited by that, demand is really strong. Strong. Our business model on the IP side is all about a licensing fee up front, and then we collect a royalty on chips shipped.

Yeah.

That all kind of changed for us at the end of March when we announced our first product. So now we are in that soup as well. We have huge, huge demand for the product, which is an Arm AGI CPU driven by I would say, you know, somewhat selfishly, it's a great product. It's 2x the performance at the same power as the competition. But also with all this takeoff of agentic demand and all these agents that essentially spawn off workloads, CPUs do a lot of that work. There's been a huge demand for CPUs. So we were fortunate in terms of timing of announcing that product. But yes, just like everyone else now in that world, We're looking for all kinds of avenues to find increased supply because demand is extremely strong. So yeah, to your question, we feel it on both sides. We feel it from our end customers on the IP side who are trying to ship as much as possible and then ourselves because we've got our own end customers that are really, really pushing us for supply.

So when you're getting into your new own chip business, what changes for you?— are you a fan of founder mode? Is this something where you're clearing your schedule so that you can spend more time on that new growing division, that new opportunity? Are you bringing in a new team? Are you shuffling folks around in the organization who you know can deliver on this new initiative? Like, what is your managerial philosophy for delivering on that?

Yeah, you know, I've had a fortunate opportunity in my career to work for I've worked for a lot of founders directly. Probably if I just think back now over the last 25 years, I've kind of, I've not been a founder myself, but I've worked directly for founders, whether it was early startup companies, then a bunch of time at NVIDIA working for Jensen, and then at SoftBank who owns Arm. You know, Mos is a founder.

Yeah.

And what I found for myself personally is that is probably the style it's best with me personally. So what does that mean in terms of daily activity? Am I in the meetings with the operations guys figuring out where the supply is coming from? Absolutely. Am I thinking really, really hard about what we want to do next in terms of product and can we get the supply and can we be strategic to a number of different customers? Absolutely. Did we bring in new people with new skill sets and new capabilities to help us there? Yes, we had to. You know, building chips is not the same as building IP. You need people who can do backend design, customer validation, supporting customers. You need operations folks that can work downstream. So we knew we needed to do all that. I had done a lot of that in my past in previous jobs and careers. So I had a good sense of what was required. And as importantly, I had a really good team around me that also folks who came from that, who came from that world. So yes, high degree of focus. And I don't know if I would say I've gone into full founder mode, but that's kind of how I operate, I think intrinsically. And as you get on in your career, you start to find out what are the environments that not only resonate with you, but you can thrive in. And then for me, that's definitely one.

We talked about like this interesting phenomenon in AI where with 20/20 hindsight, you can look back and see that the ChatGPT moment was a turning point. Claude Code, as you mentioned, reasoning models, there's these unlocks that feel binary in hindsight and they sort of blur together as they're happening. But a couple months later, you can see that there's some sort of takeoff. Are you, do you have a vision of what we're waiting for for the next one? Or are you more zoomed out looking at broader trends, sort of straight lines on log graphs and you see that capability will come as compute scales?

I think it's a little bit the latter. I mean, people like to look at the ChatGPT moment or the Claude Code moment, and maybe that's mile marker 6 in a marathon or mile marker 8. But actually what they are is proof points of scaling that the more compute you can apply to the problem, the more sophisticated the level of problem you can solve. And that's what I think we are seeing on all levels. So I don't think there's another aha moment. You know, people talk about AGI or ASI or things of that nature. I think what you're starting to see is for some of these models, for example, or some of these applications, we don't have the datasets and the internet to solve them. So, and these are like science problems, right? Engineering problems.

Mm-hmm.

Yet using using the compute and models to create synthetic data to help you solve these complex engineering problems that you can't find on the internet, that could be the next thing, you know, if you will. So I don't know that there's another end quote moment ahead of us. I think what we have seen so far is that the law of scaling has not been defied. Mm-hmm. And the more compute you can apply to these problems and the more power that's required prepared for that and everything around it, we get greater and greater benefits.

Can you— I'm interested to hear how AI is changing chip design specifically, like the actual work that your team does on a day-to-day basis. But I'd also like a little bit of a primer on just computer-aided design through your tenure, because it's not like it was pencil and paper 3 years ago and now it's a single prompt, make a great CPU. So I imagine we're on a, it feels probably a little bit smoother to you, but there's a lot of excitement about AI actually designing chips. Where are we on that trend? Where were we 10 years ago?

Yeah, I remember as I was smiling when you said that, I think I remember my first job out of TI, we actually had, I think 4-foot by 4-foot tables where we would actually lay out printed copies of the actual chip itself. To look at the layouts from a transistor level, trying to figure out exactly what we had done from a design standpoint. And that was before the workstations really had a lot of sophistication to do automated design. People talked about CAD and CAM of that nature. Now when you get to the billions of transistors on a chip, there's no way you're printing that stuff out, et cetera, et cetera. Chip design is pretty interesting. On one level, it's code. Code. In other words, when you write a piece of software to describe what a circuit's doing, that's a piece of software we use or the industry uses something called Verilog to describe what RTL is, which is a different version of Python or C, if you will. But chip design is a multidimensional problem. You can write RTL in Verilog and it can be functionally correct. I can do an adder or a multiplier or a certain level of circuit, but to get that to operate at a certain frequency, consuming a certain level of power, and then occupying the smallest set of millimeters on a piece of silicon, that's still a very hard problem.

Mm-hmm.

So the industry isn't there yet in terms of being able to use those tools to essentially The nirvana would be I come up with an idea, I press a button and I can go tape it out at TSMC, right? That is sort of nirvana. And will we get there at some point in time? Most likely we will. We're a ways away because the data sets aren't quite correct and we don't have the good closed-loop systems, but we'll get there. But where it's helping in chip design are things like— let me back up and just say in chip design, a lot of the work actually is not in designing the circuits. Right. It's actually in verifying the circuits, it's in bug checks, it's in validate— validation. And AI helps a lot there. AI can do a great job in terms of triaging bugs. Engineer will do a run over a weekend and come back on a Monday and see where the bugs are and triage them and fix them. In the AI world, that can all happen automatically. AI can not only— Yeah. Order the bugs in terms of the high priority bugs, but in some cases can fix them. So we are seeing that today. We are absolutely seeing the benefit of AI helping us design chips faster, to get bugs out quicker, to help us in the validation process, which is super important because these chips are getting bigger and bigger. The bigger they get, the more complicated they are to build, the longer it takes. So it's a little bit like running uphill against a treadmill. We're running fast, but the chips are getting hard. So it's not like we've shaved chip development times in half yet, but without the tools, I think they would be, it'd be longer to develop. So we're certainly seeing benefit.

Bit of a more anodyne question, but where else is AI permeating within Arm Holdings? I'm interested to know, like you have license fees, is there, are there AI agents making sure that invoices get paid appropriately, like customer support, even just, you know, you have, you probably have a ton of documentation. Have you wrapped that in an LLM? Like there's a bunch of like, you know, very basic use cases for AI that you see propagate through all sorts of businesses. How have you thought about adopting AI outside of the core context?

All over the place. I would say probably 85 to 90% of the company is using it in some way, shape, or form. Shape or form. We use it in legal, for example, to look at contracts, to do inputs and checks against our standard terms and conditions. It's very, very fast. Finance teams uses it for all different kind of functions. One of the more interesting ones that we use it for is, so on our IP business, we collect a royalty for every chip shipped.

Yeah.

We have a quirk in our financial model in that we have to every quarter accrue for the royalties that we think will come in the next quarter. So it's a forecasting tool. And that forecasting tool is almost like a GDP hedge fund where we're trying to look at macroeconomic indicators, what's going on in terms of certain markets. We use AI to help us rationalize what our predictions are. And it's very, very good.

Yeah.

When we, when we report the royalties at the end of a quarter and then the following quarter we do something which is called a true-up. In other words, where we were wrong and where the error bars were. And I tell you, AI makes the forecast really, really well. And then just something anecdotally, you might be sitting in a meeting where you're brainstorming about different ideas and you're trying to figure out what's the size of this market or who's shipped this much volume into this area or is someone using using this type of substrate. You know, in the past that would be, we'll go look this up offline and get some answers. People are using ChatGPT or Claude or any of those tools real time in a meeting and you just get answers much more quickly. And by the way, it's not necessarily that it's 100% right answer each time, but it's 80 to 90% close enough that you can start making decisions. So we use it everywhere and I use it all the time.

Of course. How are you thinking about, about more farther out opportunities or technologies. I'm interested to know if you have a view on, you know, these wafer-scale ASICs or even quantum computing. Is there something where you're starting an investigatory R&D process to see if there's at least an integration in the future, if not an indigenous like R&D effort?

Yeah, no, that you, we were talking earlier about, you know, is this the most exciting time in the industry. And there was a time, you know, 20 years ago when semiconductors were not seen as the next growth engine. Yeah. And a lot of the investment and growth went into other areas.

Yeah.

Now, not only is there amazing opportunity for what you just described, whether it's wafer-scale compute or in-memory compute or different computer architectures, but everything around material sciences, different components, whether it's co-packaged optics whether it's different type of copper, the system is the computer.

Mm-hmm.

And you have to think about everything that goes into it relative to how you maximize performance. So even things, you know, believe it or not, like efficiency of turbines and efficiency of gas engines and everything goes into building out power plants because everything in the supply chain, you know, suddenly matters. And the resiliency of the power matters. Everything can't come off the grid. If you're using alternative power sources, what does that mean in terms of interruption of supply? What does that mean in terms of reliability and sustainability of the systems? So it's probably a long way of saying that there's investment opportunities, not just in the chip space, but in everything that surrounds it, because now the entire system becomes an opportunity for innovation. And at Arm, yes, we have an investment profile. We also work very closely through their parent company SoftBank in terms of looking at the investment opportunities there.

On SoftBank, what was your first meeting with Masa like?

Hmm. That was back in 2016 when they just had announced the purchase. So gosh, that was 10+ years ago. And his vision for Arm at that time was a little different than what we're doing now. But he had a big belief back then in terms of the world is going to need a trillion connected devices and everything needs to be connected on security and software and such. But my first impression of him, and I had not met him before, but obviously had known and heard of him, was he has a lot of big ideas and he's been consistent on that for the last 10 years.

So is part of your role like the translation layer between that unbridled optimism and the pragmatism that needs to keep a business running? Like, how do you see your role in the SoftBank organization?

That's a good description of it, I think, at a high level. I think the reason it works well is that I share Masa's ambition. I admire the big, bold views. I like big bets myself. He's really, really good at, at looking around corners and thinking about what are the big trends 10 years from now, and then how do we act on it quickly? So where I think I fit in is I align with that, but I'm also an operator. I'm on the ground, running a company and have put out products and solved engineering problems, et cetera, et cetera. So it's thinking about, okay, how do we take those and make those into realistic plans that we can execute on?

Yeah.

Where should we go next?

Jordi, do you have anything you need to move on to, please?

I'm interested to hear more about your path to becoming CEO.

Yeah.

It's just like, was it always on your mood board? What were the key steps? Just advice for people people who want to be in this position one day?

Yeah, I, you know, we meet a lot with new employees and I do get that question a lot. Was the CEO job something that you always aspired to? And I would say that was really probably not the case. You know, again, having in the last 25 years worked really closely with founders, if I kind of look back in terms of what that experience was and how it got got me here. First off, I was always interested in not only doing something that made a big, big difference, but I always had an intellectual curiosity to doing lots of different things. Mm-hmm. So I've done probably almost every single job that exists in kind of the semiconductor world. I've been an FAE, I've been a design engineer, I've been in sales, I've been a GM, I've been in marketing. I've done kind of all these jobs, not because I was trying to fill out a checkbox and said, "Okay, here are the 8 things I need to become a CEO." It was more a function of, I'm really curious to learn about these disciplines and learning more about how things all kind of come together. So what turned out as I was gaining more and more experience and more of those skills and working around great people like Masa and Jensen, I just started to learn a lot and became a sponge for all of that. So when the time came for me to take this role, I felt very ready for it because I had I had watched CEOs do the work. I had done a lot of different work. Now, clearly it's a different job. When you're the CEO, your jokes are a lot funnier. People always say hello to you in the halls and stuff.

Sure.

And you feel a different sense of responsibility and accountability for what's going on. But more broadly speaking, I think I was very, very lucky in that everything I had done up to my becoming a CEO had really kind of helped me get me there. And then what I tell young folks is, get as much exposure as you can to as many things as you can. The one thing that I've always found that was a trait in great people was curiosity and never stopping to learn. Because if you're never stopping to learn and you're quite curious, you will probably land in a pretty good place.

What is your approach to creating your own sort of model for what the world will look like in 2 to 3 years? The pace of— of progress over the last 3 years has been, you know, really aggressive. But at the same time, you can consistently go back and look at people's predictions, a handful of people's predictions in 2023, and let's say 2024, that have turned out to be almost perfectly accurate. And so I'm curious how you kind of curate information sources to try to build an accurate— Yeah. Accurate model of what the industry will look like in 2, 3, 4 years? You know, beyond that, it's probably much harder, but what's the approach? 'Cause everyone's sort of like selling something, right? That you're interacting with, and your job as CEO is to try to actually figure out what the world will look like so that you can build against it.

We're in a very fortunate place in the business that we run in that we're sort of at the center of the universe. And what do I mean by that? ARM's core business is compute. We do CPUs. And CPUs are table stakes. Every digital product needs a CPU, no matter what it is, whether it's the smallest device that fits in your ear or wearable or these giant data centers. And ARM is the most ubiquitous CPU platform ever invented. You guys were chatting about being the platform, you know, over 350 $350 million billion devices have shipped based on ARM. So what we have inside our company is almost like a control tower view of the entire industry, right? We just, we see everything, we talk to everyone, and as a result, we have kind of an amazing perspective in terms of where the direction of travel is going. And I think back maybe to your question in terms of how do How do we do and think about that? Because we have that view and vision and the products that we are working on and the stuff that's in the roadmap, it's not unusual to be sitting in a meeting and we're talking about the product that's going to be coming out in 2030, 2031, 2032. It's just the nature of what we have to do in terms of the business. So we have a really good view on that. And what we tend to try to look at is these gigantic macro trends. But some of the things always tend to stick, right? In terms of people, efficiency matters. Low power matters. Compute matters. And when I say low power matters, it doesn't mean everything needs to run on a battery. But ultimately, you can't continue to have all these parameters go up and to the right because the costs get into play, thermal economics get into play, et cetera, et cetera.

Mm-hmm.—

It's almost like that Bezos approach where he has some line, he can't predict the future, but he knows that customers are going to want things faster and cheaper.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a good way to describe it. Those macro trends don't change. If we were having this discussion in 2000, that's still a valid comment. Now, 2000, we'd be talking about, oh, the internet is going to explode. And we're going to have to build out this fiber. We need all these lasers, et cetera, et cetera. It subsided, but the internet obviously is foundational to everything we do today.

Yeah.

And AI is kind of the same. I mean, it's almost a utility, right? It will be something that will be used by everything, everywhere, by everyone. But gravity will still apply, right? People are going to want to make sure it's efficient. They're going to want to make sure it's economical, and they're going to want to make sure they're getting benefit from it. So when you think about product development, you have to have that kind of sensibility that makes sure that you're delivering on that.

What are you expecting from robotics broadly over the next 2 to 3 years? Like, I imagine you have an interesting— you're able to look in some of these customer segments and maybe see, you know, areas that represent less than 1% of revenue starting to to maybe grow at a faster clip. But I think people are asking like, when are we gonna have the ChatGPT of robotics? Which I think people just bucket like a humanoid that can be economically valuable or have some like utility. But it's probably much more likely that it's possible it's already happened like in an industrial setting and it just, it's gonna look different. But what's your— Yeah. What are you kind of predicting in the, in, you know, before 2030, let's say, in robotics broadly based on what you're seeing?

2030 might be a good tipping point. I think it's gonna take a little longer than we think and it'll be bigger than we think. And by that, I mean the business models I think will need to be worked out. I think robots as a service is probably more viable than buying fixed $100,000 robot, $100,000 robots. The bill of materials on those will come down, but at the end of the day, there's just a lot of parts. There's motors, there's actuators, there's computers. You're not gonna be able to make one, I think, that's gonna be $4,000, for example.

Yeah.

But can you provide them at a cost where it can be a very, very good replacement in certain areas for human labor in terms of what you're paying per year and have it subsidized? Yeah, I think that's quite real. And I do think, you know, it's a hard problem to solve, right? Because one of the hardest problems around robots with AI is our fingers, right? Our fingers are unbelievably good at what they do in terms of sensing, applying the right level of pressure, being able to pick up a phone or pick up a 20-pound weight or picking up a needle to thread a needle. Right. To thread a needle.

Yeah.

That for a robot is a lot of work relative to sensors. It's a lot of work relative to motors. It's a lot of work relative to ambidexterity, but it will be a solved problem. And when it becomes a solved problem, it's going to be transformational. I mean, you think about infrastructure projects, right? Just looking at the amount of time it takes for roadwork or putting up bridges and anything around around those spaces. You know, if you just look in the United States, the amount of infrastructure that needs replacement. If you had— and you can't find the people to do the work, right? Those, they're very, very hard skills to go off and do that. Once you start to put real automation in place around that, it's going to be hugely transformational. So, I think it'll take a little longer than people think. We see a lot of, you know, amazing stuff with humanoids and dancing robots, et cetera, et cetera. But it will be bigger than people anticipate. I think it will be gigantic.

Staying in the control tower of the AI buildout, the global economy, where are you focused on outside of your core business in terms of potential bottlenecks? We've been going back and forth on is it fabrication? Is it energy? Is it permitting, powered shells, memory? There's been so many different bottlenecks. Bottlenecks that have sort of popped up and there's been a lot of excitement and that feels like an opportunity for America or the world to focus on alleviating a bottleneck when it comes out. You're helping a lot with what you're doing, but what else is top of mind for you as you view the potential bottlenecks to just scaling AI?

Those are, you hit on all the big ones and they're all challenging, right? I think logic is a challenge. Memory is certainly a challenge. All the things that you mentioned. I think it is a fantastic opportunity on the flip side for the United States to be able to invest in manufacturing and support of these infrastructures. I know there's been a lot of backlash, for example, about these giant data centers being built and communities not wanting data centers in their area. Mm-hmm. And then some people look at the data centers and say, oh, these data centers are so giant and they don't actually employ a lot of workers. They're just giant Costcos with whirring motors inside. But I would argue that while that may seem to be true in terms of the— when the operation is completed, the ecosystem that gets created by building out these data centers is immense.

Right. Mm-hmm.

And if you can have the entire supply chain whether it's again around the motors, the turbines, the air conditioning, the chillers, the chips.

Yeah.

If the United States can put that all in such a way that is gonna be all vertically integrated, that's huge, huge job opportunities for us. You know, I read some of this in an op-ed about 71% of folks are, you know, are kind of against the, against data centers. And I was thinking to myself, gosh, this reminds me of almost back when the US had most of the semiconductor fabs in the world, you know, 30, 40 years ago. And people weren't complaining about fabs per se, but there were a lot of complaints about the chemicals and things of that nature. And then you had labor shortages. And next thing you know, 35 years later, every advanced fab, whether it's memory or whether it's logic, is not inside the United States. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

And I would say just on these supply shortages, which we have now, which are real, I think it's a great opportunity for the United States to really boost up domestic manufacturing. And not just, again, like I said, around the data centers, but the ecosystem around it. If you think about the automobile industry, one of the powers that that drove for the US industry was the huge supply chain around automobiles.

Yeah.

That created lots and lots of jobs. Crops. I think data centers are similar.

Yeah, yeah, it's always been—

Yeah, good point.

People point to Flint, Michigan as a place where water was contaminated, but if you trace back through the Flint, Michigan story, it is the departure of the General Motors plant in Michigan that actually led to all the renegotiations about where the water would come from and ultimately the degradation of the local water supply. It's sort of the flip of once the businesses pull out and the local economy stagnates, then you wind up with the environmental problems.

And it's super hard to bring them back once they go.

Yep, 100%. I like it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. We went overtime, but this is a great conversation.

Yeah, thanks for having me on.

We really appreciate you taking the time. Have a great weekend. My pleasure, sir. Have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon, Rene.

Cheers.

Thank you so much. Goodbye. Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And without further ado, we are going to reindustrialize. We couldn't be there in person, but we have a correspondent on the ground. How are you doing? Welcome back.

I'm doing great. How are you guys?

Good to see you. Take us through it. Quick reintroduction on yourself. The company, but then tell us about how Reindustrialize is going. We were just talking about Michigan, actually.

Yeah, so I'm Rob Slaughter, co-founder and CEO of Defense Unicorns. Defense Unicorns, what's the big idea? It's all about getting software to warfighters. People don't realize how hard it is to get modern software capabilities on a lot of the military assets. And what we've done as a company is build an entire tech stack from the ground up and just made it easy.

Yeah. What's the mood on the ground? On the ground like? Take us through re:Industrialize. How long have you been out there? What's been the highlight? What are the key themes?

Yeah, so we're out here today. Actually, the noise in the background, just give you guys a sneak peek.

Whoa.

So we are actually at the Navy's War Hacker event. We recently announced our product launch, UDS Fleet, and so we happen to be We, you know, here in San Diego, super excited about the Anduril 250 that's coming up here.

Yeah.

Today, actually, and all the folks around me, there's 350 builders, you know, across the Department of War, all working and hacking on cool problems. And so we're excited to work side by side with the, you know, military and government and building solutions here.

Is this a new trend, just a new era for software defense? Technology? Because it feels like, you know, a lot of the defense tech energy was around new systems. You're building boats, you're building drones, you're building counter drones, counter boats or something. A lot of like hard tech getting unlocked, a lot on the back of the Anduril story and a bunch of other successful companies. But this feels a little bit new to me. Are we in a software boom these days?

Yeah, so a couple things. Nature of warfare is changing.

Sure.

And so I think people realize that a little bit, but to give you guys some perspective, when I was active duty Air Force, when I was deployed, there's 4,000 airmen managing 70 aircraft. You can imagine in the not so different distant future, there's gonna be 70 airmen managing 4,000 or 40,000 autonomous systems.

Yeah, yeah.

And so the sheer nature of warfare is changing just based on the sheer number of systems. Also the demand to get updates out faster has never been more important because of a capabilities perspective. And so that's the advantage side. On the national security side, the scary side is you have new foundational models. You know, I know Anthropic, you know, had their model pulled due to national security concerns. I mean, those concerns are very real. Like, we need to obviously secure our systems. The ability to patch and update your software has never been more, you know, more important. And so honestly, shout out you know, what's changed. The threat is real. Modern warfare is here. You know, shout out to the Trump administration and honestly the entire Department of War to just take new approaches to doing business. And so, you know, this hackathon that we're at today, you know, which is, you know, Department of War, you know, effort, you know, it's one of many things that the Department of War is doing to just take kind of new approaches. And really just like the big idea here and what we're trying to get after is like, like, you know, you have a team full of industry people. It's hard in industry to actually sit side by side a warfighter. You might develop a product and be guessing as to what their issues are. You can actually sit side by side with them. You can get real feedback and vice versa. As a former military member, you really have no idea what industry is capable of and something that you might think is a hard challenge, somebody can actually solve overnight. And so, you know, I think this is one of many things that the administration has been doing. You know, I can't, you know, as a citizen and somebody who spent the last two decades in the Department of War, I really love to see the bureaucracy just like totally get out of the way. I think this is a new vibe. You know, I know you got a lot of tech companies like ourselves, you know, really entering the ecosystem. And I think the reason why it continues to grow is because companies are finding success. And why are they finding success? It's because the military members on the other side are open to new approaches. They see the demand. They know that they need to be operating in a different way. And I think there's a whole industry of startups that are eager to work with those customers.

Do you think there's more pre-seed stage companies that reindustrialized this year than 2 years ago or less?

Well, I would say that it's, you know, for me, this is my first one, so I don't know between this year and last year. But I'll tell you what, We got a startup over here. It's like 4 people. It was 3 people a week ago, and I can't go in exactly what they're doing, but I've been blown away. You know, like I said, being a former Air Force member, they're working on some awesome things. There are small companies here. Right actually behind me, we got a small group of, you know, small company, about 10 people building a drone live, integrating with some new software capabilities. And so I think the appetite for smaller and smaller teams because as you guys know very well, AI has lowered the barrier to entry. And so as AI lowers the barrier to entry, there's an appetite for the Department of War and the government to work with these smaller and smaller teams.

Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on the show.

Yeah, thanks for calling in from the hackathon.

We'll talk to you soon.

I'm sure the energy's awesome.

Have a good rest of your day.

Great to see you.

Awesome.

We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

It's a slaughter.

Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Our next guest is almost here. I'm not sure if—

I guess not yet.

Fully in the waiting room. We have Rob Reid, the author of After On and Year—

VC Brags hit the timeline.

What happened?

Said I want I want to sincerely apologize for poking fun at the most marginalized and victimized group in our society, venture capitalists.

Yes, the Streisand effect was fully out on the timeline over the past few days, going back and forth with venture capitalists over something that wasn't quite a brag, but it was more just a reflection on the time in San Francisco, how much money's flowing around, around how many people are raising different funds. But VC Brags, of course, takes a screenshot, posts it, and that was not well received. But that, you know, if you're getting dunked on, you gotta lean in. I think Jason Calacanis learned this and has done a fantastic job negotiating with VC Brags to the point where the whole first investor in Uber, third investor in Uber thing— No, if you get—

If VC Brags takes a shot at you and you're an investor, you've got to lean in. Yeah. You can't—

You've made it. You're worth taking a shot at.

Yeah.

Like, people are talking about you. You're not a nobody anymore. Anyway, we have Rob Reid in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TV panel. Rob, how are you doing?

Doing well. Hello, gentlemen.

Thank you so much for taking the time.

What's going on? It's great to have you.

We wanted to talk about, about all the advancements in bio, biosecurity, what's happening there. But since it's the first time on the show, I would love to know a little bit about your background and sort of introduce you to the audience. Could you take us through some of your earlier journeys, some of the companies that you've worked with and what you're doing now? And then we can go into the hot topics of today.

Absolutely. So I came to the Valley right out of school and I'm chronologically advanced enough that it was during the first wave wave of the internet boom. Yeah. So, I was at a big company that got very aware of the internet's sort of oncoming tide early, I'd say, got into the internet group there, became an internet person in like 1994, which is very, very early. And as a result of that, I saw a lot of things coming. I ended up writing a book about the rise of the internet as a commercial medium kind of as it was happening. And that got me well widely known and I became sort of a junior VC at a junior firm. And then I took off and started—

What year did you publish the book? Sorry to interrupt.

The book came out in 1997. It's called Architects of the Web. And I profiled 8 entrepreneurs—

I think this could be a good business opportunity.

There might be some commerce that happens on the World Wide Web.

It's amazing.

Yeah. That was one of my theories. There might be commerce. There— people might— create stocks, video, crazy stuff.

How much pushback did you get at the time? Because we've covered it before on the show, but there was this almost— if you look at the doom and fear that people had around the internet, it almost aligns one-to-one with AI. There was—

The Y2K moment.

Yeah, Y2K, cyber.

Putting all bookstores, all retail, the mall —retail apocalypse.

Yeah, the SaaS apocalypse. It was the retail apocalypse. Almost— there's basically a one-to-one example for each.

Yeah.

This was in the honeymoon period before the panicking started. So, '97, it's still, you know, primarily a tech-forward thing. And there was wild optimism about what was going to happen. Although we didn't have the vocabulary yet, I think if you ask people people what the internet would do for information and informedness, people would describe a combination of Wikipedia and Snopes, if you remember Snopes.

Oh, yeah.

Nobody ever imagined that disinformation would spread rapidly, that it would be divisive. It was a real kumbaya vibe early on. And people were obviously a little bit overoptimistic on that front. But boy, were they right about the economic opportunity and the degree to which it would change our lives and the way we do business. And so at that time with that book, it was celebrating that moment and really taking a deep, deep look at what was happening right then at the outset. And it was a small enough industry, and I had been a part of it just a few months before I started writing it, that I had access to everybody. And I got to know everybody of any consequence. I mean, this is when you could go over to Netscape and get a meeting with Marc Andreessen. Yeah. If you had a good reason to, with relatively little difficulty. And through all the relationships that I made through that, I ended up getting this sort of field promotion to be a VC far sooner than I thought I would. Did that for a couple years, learned a ton, started this music— I started a company as the solo founder of a company that created a music service called Rhapsody.

But tell us the domain name of that company.

Oh, listen.com.

Fantastic domain name. We love these amazing domains. They're so rare these days. But back then, everyone had a great domain. What was the entrepreneurial journey like? Was it a tough transition? What was the whole journey like? How do you reflect on it today?

You know, the toughest thing was that I'd never really managed prior to that. I'd been a mid-level marketing grunt at a big computer company and then a VC. You learned a lot of lessons as a VC, but had to be a self-taught manager.

Mm-hmm.

And that's hard enough when you're doing it for the first time. But when you have people who work for people who work for people who work for you, you know, that's a lot to, to rocket through. We got up to about 200 employees before we sold. Um, and so that was the trickiest thing. And it is lonely being a solo founder because there's no one person. You may have great investor relationships, great board relationships, um, you know, even great relationships, obviously, with your team, there's nobody that looks at things through precisely the same lens as you. That said, every co-founder that's added to an equation, or every co-founder relationship, which scales quadratically if you go to 3, 4, etc., is an axis upon which a startup can break.

Yeah.

And so that's sort of the trade-off that you face. And, you know, I'm glad I did it as a solo founder for a whole bunch of reasons, but that's Yeah, interesting.

When did you start thinking about bio-risk? Generally, that seems like a second-order effect of technology at this point, but what piqued your interest? What was your process to get up to speed and start actually thinking through tactical implications and forecasting risk?

In a way, it connects to that startup Rhapsody. Most of your listeners may not remember Rhapsody, but for all intents and purposes, we were the first Spotify. We created the unlimited on-demand streaming model that everybody else later adopted. We were the first company to sign full catalog licenses with all the major labels even before Apple did for their MP3 store. And when I came out of that, I wanted to take a little bit of time off. And I'd been a writer. I'd written a couple of books, but nonfiction. And so, I I wrote a book about a crazy alien civilization that was so into American pop music, they accidentally committed the biggest copyright infringement in human— in the history of the universe.

The galaxy.

And bankrupted the entire universe, yeah. Based on a true story, I like to say. And so that, I thought I was doing for myself. Bizarrely enough, it briefly and barely— I want to put those words out there— became a New York Times bestseller. And I was living in LA—

That lasts forever.

I know. You said briefly, but it's forever.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's like, I was like a little prairie dog coming up to the bottom of the list and looking around for a couple weeks, but you do get to say that.

Forever.

And I was living in Los Angeles with, we were just newly married. My wife was hosting a TV show that kind of had us marooned down there for a long period of time. So before starting another company, I leaned into more writing and doing a bunch of deep science science podcasting, and this is where it all sort of comes together. Often, I mean, generally interviewing world-class scientists all the way up to the Nobel level about, you know, very deeply about their work. And I would spend 30 or 40 hours of prep before each interview because I was mainly doing it for the fun of it. And that was a great way to learn about a bunch of different things. Through one of my novels and then through my podcasting, I got more and more more concerned about synthetic biology risk. And this probably started about 10 years ago. And at the time, you could see that synthetic biology, like computing, was and is an exponential technology, which means that the things that are incredibly hard or indeed even impossible to do today, unless you're one of 2 or 3 people, are the types of things that freshmen in college will be able to do with the passage of time. And when you think about the bad things that can happen on the edges of synthetic biology, and this is before we got to the AI intersection, you could really imagine catastrophic acts of bioterror or bioerror, you know, 70 years in the future. And, you know, I started diving deeper into this, speaking about it, writing about it. And then right before COVID I gave a TED Talk talk about the dangers of an unnatural pandemic. And of course, a few months later we had COVID. And so I've gotten deeper and deeper into this. It's my public service side. I have made one investment that is connected to this as a VC, which is what I do now. But it's my public service side. And I've at this point probably put, you know, at least a couple thousand hours into it over the years.

There's, there's been some movement, at least like open letters signed by AI lab leaders— the most recent was around basically record keeping and sort of KYC rules at companies that manufacture DNA, RNA sequences, if I understand it correctly. Is that the right hinge point to focus on? Are you a fan of an ensemble approach where the models have guardrails baked in? And then also, if you're using the model through a SaaS product, then the software also is tracking things, then the company that makes the actual sequence might have guardrails, and then maybe the equipment is regulated with licenses. Do you have a prescriptive approach that you're advocating for at this point? Is it evolving? How are you thinking about that?

It's always evolving, but there are a few very, very simple and incredibly inexpensive things that we can do we can do as first steps that would significantly improve the situation. So first of all, all of the foundation model companies are very, very aware of this risk. They all have what's called classifier models that are there, that we've all probably experienced versions of them—

Yeah.

That are there to prevent people from doing, you know, dangerous biological research or try to create dangerous bugs. Every frontier model, every model has what's called a system card, which they describe the model in. Capabilities. And every system card I've ever seen has acknowledged that classifiers— classifier models, which are like smaller models, almost like bouncers that sit in front of the big model— classifiers can and are always fooled. So they are doing everything they can. They will continue to. We should be grateful for that. But we know that that's only the beginning of it. The next issue is securing our DNA supply. So at this point, I mean, practically anybody who wants to make a long strand of DNA goes to a service bureau to have that done because the experts are better at it. Mm-hmm. And researchers would rather do research. There is a consortium called the International Genome Synthesis Sequencing Consortium or something like that. It's called the IGSC.

Mm-hmm.

It's a voluntary consortium that does very good work. They put together what they call sequences of concern. And if somebody tries to order one of those things, you know, traffic light, red, yellow will go off and they'll dive into the order. Order. This is expensive for companies to comply with. And it's also voluntary. The IGSC claims that they speak for 80% of the synthesized DNA in the world. But that was kind of an out of the, you know, you know, kind of blue sky guess that they made. Over 10 years ago, and they don't have very many Chinese members, so that's no longer true. But even if it was 80%, I can confidently say that if there were a town in which 80% of the bars enforced the drinking age, that would be a town without a drinking age, right? Mm-hmm. So it does nothing. A bad actor is going to go to a non-IGSC shop, obviously, and it's even worse than that. It'd be almost like you had security lines at the airport airport that were voluntary, and it was actually cheaper to fly if you didn't go through the security line because you save money by not, you know, this adds to the cost basis. We need to make that mandatory. And there was actually an open letter signed by a lot of folks, including from AI Labs, just a few days ago, pushing for that.

Yeah.

This is a dead simple thing. And by the way, it's as much in China's interests as it is in our own. Own. Because, you know, if anybody can order any strand of DNA that they want, and we'll get into what they can do with that DNA once they have it, if you'd like, the two entities that have the most to lose are the United States and China. And this is something that we can team up on with them and say, yeah, there's going to— there needs to be an international regime. It has to be mandatory. And it also has to apply to benchtop synthesizers where people can make much shorter strands without having to go to a service bureau.

Mm-hmm. Bad actor gets a hold of or is working with somebody that's not voluntarily being, I guess, regulated. What can they do with it?

Well, in a worst-case scenario, let's think about something that's not just hypothetical. Let's say that there is a really deadly genome that's in wide circulation online. Everybody knows what it is. It is. 1918 flu happens to be just such a genome because our government put it there. They put it there a long time ago when very few people could do anything with it. But the passage of time always happens, and it was a very foolish thing to do because we now live in a world in which 30,000 people roughly, perhaps a little more, have the tools and the know-how which would allow them to basically animate that virus just from the DNA. Mm-hmm. If they felt like doing it. And the last time that thing came around, it killed a staggeringly high percentage of the people in the world, and we don't want that to happen again.

Mm-hmm.

There's reasons to think it might not turn into a pandemic this time, but let's skip the rabbit hole. This is just a hypothetical. Um, there is a brilliant, um, professor at MIT named Kevin Esvelt who stress-tested the system with this in mind, and he basically cut up a whole bunch of orders which collectively, added up to Spanish flu and sent it to a whole bunch of different labs. Most of those labs actually knew that this was a sequence that was part of the Spanish flu. But although the Spanish flu virus is very, very tightly regulated by our government, it's one of the very most regulated biological, you know, critters or sequences or whatever you want to say in the world because it's called a select agent. There's fewer than 100 of those. Mm-hmm. They didn't stop themselves from sending the DNA because it's only the entire genome that's regulated.

Mm-hmm.

And so this was a scientific paper he did. He did it with the knowledge and cooperation of the FBI. It was a red-teaming exercise.

Mm-hmm.

And even going to IGSC-compliant labs, he could pull this all together, and somebody like Kevin and about 30,000 other people could then animate the virus. And the number of people who can do that is only gonna go up. Probably fewer than 30 when that genome was first posted to the internet. At some point, it will be anybody in freshman biology.

Mm-hmm.

So, please. What do you, I feel like every 6 months, there's a very concerning headline where like some illegal bio lab is like raided by law enforcement. And then it just sort of like goes away. What do you make of that? Of that, I'm sure you've kind of tracked a lot of these stories.

Yeah.

How, I'm assuming if law enforcement is consistently finding them, that there's a lot more out there that aren't found. Why do people, why are they created in the first place? What is the United States doing to crack down further? All that stuff.

Yeah, I mean, we can rely on the fact that we have not found each and every one of these things. And this all keys off of proliferation. So again, I'll go back to the notion that synthetic biology is an exponential technology like computing.

Mm-hmm.

With something like that, you have very, very, very rapid proliferation and very, very, very rapid drops in cost. So just think about transistors. I forget the statistic, but it was in the late '50s that one very brilliant person in the entire world developed the ability to play checkers with a computer. You know, he had one of 5 machines that could do it. He was one of 2 people who were smart enough to program it, whatever. And with the passage of a couple decades, you know, anybody can play chess. And then it gets to the point that any street kid with a tiny budget can do that. We'll go through the same thing with synbio. Now, these labs that we're discovering have not been terribly capable yet. But because— particularly when synbio humanity meets AI, the level of expertise that you need in order to achieve really powerful things that perhaps nobody even can achieve right now will become increasingly achievable on a very, very low budget with the passage of like a single-digit number of years. And so these labs are— we're hearing more and more about them because it's becoming cheaper and easier to create them. And, you know, this needs to be something that we as a society think about and invest in as much as cybersecurity. We spend tens of billions of dollars a year on that, as we should. Mm-hmm. But the consequences of, you know, the human genome and therefore the human species being taken down by a cunningly engineered virus are so much higher than that in cyber that we should be rationally making at least as much of an investment. And at this point, we're making a vanishingly small amount of investment. I think we should point out part of this investment needs to be about, you know, preventing bad actors without hobbling our ability to get incredible gains from synbio and from AI models. And so that has to be done very deftly and very intelligently. And so simply passing a law and saying we've passed the law ain't enough. Not that we're in any danger of passing a law that makes us more secure on a bio level, but the objective The urgent objective needs to be to allow creativity and technological and scientific advance to run rapid and bring incredible benefits to us, but not allowing ourselves to get taken down. And this thing that I mentioned with SecureDNA, that would cost, you know, virtually nothing because there are tools that do this that are actually open source. It's just not required to anybody. Mm-hmm. There just needs to be a requirement in that case and some enforcement. And we haven't yet had the social willpower to even do that. Hopefully that's going to change with all these powerful signatures that are starting to accrue on these open letters.

Seems pretty straightforward that AI's ability to find software vulnerabilities, you know, basically sending them, basically sending a model and saying, hey, just figure out vulnerabilities in this infrastructure or this piece of software. Same, do you believe like already the models have that same ability to effectively find like vulnerabilities in the human species?

Oh, there's no question. Yeah, there's no question because we are not as robust as the macOS, for instance. There are lots and lots of known vulnerabilities that we have already that have not been patched, will never be patched, cannot be patched. And so, yeah, we're a much softer target than Linux or macOS.

And so how does, it seems like the solution is, needs to be like you've been talking about, focused on like actually making it more difficult to procure DNA. Because if you assume that open models You know, a bad actor is gonna be able to have an open model with no guardrails, with access to enough compute that they can send the model on, you know, basically a goal, which is like find as many possible, you know, known vulnerabilities as well as potentially net new vulnerabilities in, you know, the human species. And so that, it feels like cat's out of the bag. There maybe already or will be within the next 12 months. But do you think—

Hopefully 24 or 36, but perhaps already.

Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah. Last question for me. You know, as guns proliferated society, so did metal detectors. Is there an opportunity for more diffuse early warning detection around sickness. I'm just thinking if I'm— if a Whoop or an Oura Ring or some other connected device can tell every individual, "You're getting sick, you should get checked out, you shouldn't go to work, you shouldn't go to that popu— you shouldn't spread anything," feels like that could make quarantining more targeted and potentially more of an early warning detection system. Are you optimistic about that?

You've actually hit on a couple couple of really interesting things with that question. Let's go to metal detectors and guns first. In 1972, astounding fact, there were over 50 hijackings of large commercial airliners in the United States.

Yeah.

That started being true in the late '60s.

Yeah.

Why? There was literally no airport security at all in the United States. And who was lobbying against it? The airlines.

Oh.

Because they thought it would be expensive and it would would make people think, seeing those security gates would make people think that airline travel was dangerous. I'll tell you what would make me think it's dangerous, 50 hijackings a year.

Wait, and—

So, we have protectors. I'm sorry, go ahead.

That people would hijack a plane and enjoy—

Hostage it.

Hostages.

Hostage it, pay me money. So, was there a lot of like ransom payments being made? Was that like the primary—

We gotta do a whole deep dive on that.

Yeah, I guess we're gonna do that. We could do 3 hours tomorrow on hijacked planes.

There was everything. There was everything. So there's a great book called The Skies Belong to Us to tell the story. But this was kind of the late '60s and there were a lot of radicals and the most popular destination was Cuba. Somebody would have it in their heads that they're gonna fly down to Cuba with a hijacked plane, Fidel's gonna become their best friend and it's just gonna be, you know, rum coladas and beaches for the rest of their life. It literally got so bad that they started started a dormitory for wayward American hostages, and I'm not exaggerating, in Havana. And they would send the plane back and just have to deal with these entitled college or post-college kids. Anyway, the security guards' gates go in and we go from 50 hijackings in '72 to zero in '73.

Yeah.

And then there's kind of a very occasional thing and then 9/11 hits.

Yeah.

And after 9/11 hits, We take security much more seriously than ever, and there has not been a single one in the United States in, you know, 25 years.

Yep.

What does this tell us? It means that you just— you don't want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. A lot of people say, "Well, gee, securing the DNA is only part of the solution." It is, but you make a major speed bump in front of people. It becomes a much higher bar, much higher intent something you don't do on a whim because you're pissed off that your girlfriend or boyfriend broke up with you. And then it becomes much, you know, more difficult to get over that bar, and you can really, really plummet the level of ambient risk down to the point that it's really only determined actors who are out there who become much easier to detect using intelligence and law enforcement and all the things that we want to use.

Mm-hmm.

And then in terms of your question of surveillance, yeah. We're pretty far off from when Oura Rings could necessarily do that, but we should be thinking about improving them and tying them into the primary care system in the US, if only because we're worried about sick days at work. Like, there's lots of benefits to that. But the other thing we can be doing is what's called biosurveillance, which is getting a global detection system out there. The best place, believe it or not, is airports.

Yeah.

Where everybody comes in and all the way waste products from all of those planes goes into a single place where you can sequence parts of that wastewater and see if there is a genetic sequence that's never been seen before that is suddenly starting to grow exponentially in various points of the world. Mm-hmm. Because that would mean it's either something with a long incubation cycle or it's what some people call a stealth pandemic, which is something that is engineered to have an extravagantly long incubation cycle. That so everybody's asymptomatic, but it's spreading and spreading. If that ever happens, we want to know pronto. And the budget for some very, very powerful plans for biosurveillance has been as low as, you know, $50 million setup and $10 million a year thereafter. These are not expensive things.

Yeah, yeah, we got to do it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. We really—

Let's do this again soon.

We got to do this again soon. This is fantastic.

Absolutely.

Also, there's a bunch of your fans in the chat. In the chat hoping for more podcasts from you because they loved it.

Oh, your podcast?

Yes, from your show.

I'll talk to them.

Well, thank you so much, Rob.

Great to have you. Have a great rest of your day.

We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And without further ado, we have the founder and CEO of Taser. Taste Labs. We talked about it yesterday on the show. Sorry for keeping you waiting. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. How are you doing?

What's happening?

I'm doing great. How are you guys? Thanks for having me.

Thanks for hopping on.

We talked about Taste Labs, the launch, the back and forth a little bit yesterday. I would put—

Did you mean to rage bait everyone with the name?

I knew that there was gonna be some debate about the name, but it's actually funny. We registered the company like a year ago with that name. And so before the word really popped up.

Oh, okay, okay. Yeah.

Well, you get a ton of points for that for sure.

What about this? What about if I boil down the core debate, it feels like a lot of people are very optimistic about your business. Like there are just a lot of models that where the outputs, even if you just put aside taste, like they're just not satisfactory to the user and providing more data data, more signal there, that's valuable, great, good business. But then there's this other discussion over like, can taste ever be something handled by a machine? Is it so human? We'll never touch it with the most magical godlike superintelligence. Those are the two angles. How reasonable is that as a framing, as is that of a framing for this discussion?

I think that's very reasonable. But by the way, I almost went to even do the exercise of not even using the word taste. To describe what we're doing because I think people got very caught up in the terminology.

Totally.

But ultimately, I think one thing that everyone can agree on is slop is a problem. Slop is everywhere. It's not going anywhere. It's just getting worse.

Yep.

And so that's really what we're ultimately trying to solve is how do we raise this bar of quality first and how do we just allow us to even be able to create better things with AI. But it's not a substitute for human taste and it's not trying to determine in like one taste, if that makes sense.

Yes, yes, yes. I think another thing people are worried about is like the idea of monoculture, which happens in Silicon Valley every once in a while where someone says like, "Serif fonts are tasteful, sans serif is no longer tasteful, therefore everyone must use sans serif or vice versa." And we're all like, "Wait, everything looks the same. This is actually bland. This doesn't feel as rich or tasteful as what you'd see in a thriving community that actually has a ton of variety." kind of culture to it. I'm interested to know though about the actual process. Congratulations on the funding round, but how are you thinking about actually—

Thank you.

Actually imbuing models with taste? How much of this is about data labeling? How much of this is bringing on experts with particular backgrounds? Is this a very high skill ceiling effort where you're finding, you know, artists and people with art history backgrounds like who, who is the ground truth? Where's the ground truth coming from?

Very good question. So I think first on the mono, monoculture piece, I think that's exactly what we're trying to solve. Like the whole problem with stuff is this repetition that you see, right? Every site now looks the same. Every slide deck looks the same. No one wants that. And so part of what we're doing is building this community of experts that is at the heart of everything that we do, that are a lot of designers, front-end engineers, art people that can exactly How do we bring this whole range? I think we don't even as a team want the company to be a reflection of our own personal preference. I think it's much more how do we map this whole range of preferences that exist and select the best people in the world at this so that they can bring to the table all their opinions and discussions of when is something good, when is something bad? Because also none of this can really happen in isolation, right?

Yeah.

I think, yes, first we have to really raise this floor and figure out what's the minimum bar of quality. But then I think I think there is this multitude of preferences, and that's always going to be the case. Yeah. So, I think the peacemakers kind of are there.

I always think of in text, the, "It's not this, it's that." It's the parallelism, antithetical parallelism is the name of that term. And by itself, I've probably read that exact phrase in, actually somebody pulled up an old Paul Graham essay that had that exact phrase, the forbidden AI slide. Bop phrase from a decade ago. And it's probably been in New Yorker articles and famous books, but it was only when it became so repeated that it was in every paragraph of everything that was ever generated that it became a tell and it became somewhat, I don't even know if it's less tasteful, but just annoying. And I think that—

Yeah.

I'm interested to know like how much of taste in your mind or just the quality output is driven just by variation I think that's a very good point.

Like the feeling of repetition, it will lead something to be less tasteful over time, right? That's why you have these cycles of trends because you have kind of the people that are early, but then the soon that it becomes too ubiquitous, it kind of loses its power. And so it's this moving target. And I think that understanding how do you force diversity in an intentional way, right? It's not just, for example, turning up the temperature of a model and having it produce more randomness because that's not going to work. But that wouldn't be intentional. And so it's like, how do you understand, yes, how to force that diversity, but in a way that's more intentional?

Time, what are your aesthetic superintelligence timelines? Do you think we can one day—

Because it feels like we're, I mean, even just the latest revision of the models, like if you interact with the frontier, the it's not this, it's that, like is actually gone. I haven't seen it in a long time. —like, and a lot of these things, like 6 fingers, just went away, and no one talked about it because it was only fun to talk about when it was sloppy and terrible.

What was that?

And now people are like, "Wow." Like, the victory lap was like 2 days in tech Twitter, and then everyone moved on, and they found some new bone to pick, which is maybe the human condition. We'll always find something to complain about. But yeah, do you have, like, some end state, or do you think this is a— this is a life's work? Is this something that we're gonna be pursuing for the rest of our lives?

I do think it's a bit of a life's work situation 'cause I think you'll have this phase now, like to your point, how do you fix the problem of 6 fingers? That's equivalent in design, right? Yeah. That's equivalent in writing.

Yeah.

But once you're over that, then I think it's like how do you actually raise the ceiling of that too? And that's a moving target. So I think part of this that's very different than training a model to be amazing at something like coding or math is that it's not like you can train that capability once. It's something that you need to consistently retrain. Train. I think a lot of the things the model right now is bad at is even these fundamentals, like things like vision, alignment, typography. Uh, but once that's solved, then I think it becomes much more this problem of personalization, moving trends, localization too, right? So, uh, yeah, the— honestly, I think within like a year, a lot of the capability problem will be solved in terms of what we can actually produce. But then the, the bar of ceiling, I think, is a much, much longer endeavor.

Uh, talk about, uh, transfer learning in taste where taste applies more broadly. We were just talking to the CEO of Arm Holdings, chip design firm. In labs, they talk about research taste. I imagine that there's a lot of chip design that can be done just with, you know, deterministic like Verilog model, Verilog fine-tuned model. But I would imagine if I actually went and talked to the best, you know, designers at Arm, they would say, "Yeah, there is a lot of taste in what we do." And I'm interested to know if you think there will be knock-on effects, 'cause everyone probably goes to images, front-end design, the visual taste of a visual designer. But I'm wondering if you see yourself as doing something that is in the path of solving challenges outside of visual taste, and maybe there will be implications in things that— Yeah. Maybe people outside the industry can't see the taste that goes into the design of a CPU, but in fact, there is.

Totally. So I think it's funny, it's funny you say this because whenever I'm even explaining the company, a lot of people are like, there's taste in code, right? Like I am very opinionated about the way that I write code. So I think how do you develop really a framework and almost this like infrastructure to be able to turn something that is subjective into something that's more objective or that can be codified. And that logic, I think will apply to many things way beyond just aesthetics. I think aesthetics is a super important one that we care deeply a lot about as a team, which is why we started there. But creative writing's another one, to your point. Like anything really where there's multitude of opinions applies the same logic, so.

Yeah. What does demand look like just this week? Sounds like you started the company around a year ago or at least incorporated it. I imagine that the haters would be in shambles if they, if they got a look at your pipeline, just given how much attention, attention the launch got. But what's demand been like?

The inbound of the last 48 hours has been absolutely insane. Don't get me wrong, it's actually the reason we took so long to launch. The reason we took so long to launch is actually because we already had more demand than honestly I think we could serve before before even the launch. And so it's been a very low sleep week for me trying to catch up with all the demand. But yeah, I think both on the side of the labs and of the app layer companies, it's been kind of bonkers. Still trying to wrap my head around it.

And then meeting that demand, creatives, creatives, I've had the pleasure of working with so many amazing designers, photographers, creative directors over the years. And oftentimes I've found that many of them are not— their life is not guided as commercially as many other kind of domains, right? Like software engineers, lawyers, accountants, et cetera, where if an accountant has an opportunity to work with a company for a great great salary and the company is doing something ethical or not even just not illegal, they're like, "Cool, sign me up." Whereas, creatives that I've worked with, I've at some points just offered to make an intro, "Hey, there's this company," and they'll just be like, "No." Vibes off. Vibes off.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's no price to work with a fringe brand.

How has it been talking with creatives who many of them are already like,— I've met plenty of creatives that love AI, that are like, this is amazing, this is like a new tool. But certainly many of them are also— maybe they wouldn't even admit that they enjoy it as a tool. So how's it been building out the network?

So I think there's still definitely a lot of division maybe within the creative community, like people that are really leaning into it and others that are very like anti. I think what's been really cool is actually finding these creatives that want to be that bridge. They're like, hey, I do agree that AI is inevitable and why not make it better? Why not be part of the solution to make this actually something good and that we can also use? And so that I think has been really cool. But you're right that they're way more picky, which they should be. Our founding designer actually had— we've made her a hat that says picky because I totally agree with this. It's like we have to create a community that actually people want to be a part of and are excited about. But of course, I think I think you're always gonna have people that are anti-AI especially, and that will be against it. And I think we have to find the ones that are pro.

Predictions, how many years until we see someone affectionately and nostalgically embrace AI slop? Like the slopcore aesthetic. They're bringing six fingers in, they're prompting the latest and greatest models, the Nano Banana 7, and they're like, I want you to add 6 fingers because that has a retro feel that takes me back to DALL-E 2. And I want that— 2025, bring it back soon. I want that slop mug. Yeah, yeah, maybe they just go back to the model if they're really authentic. It's like running the iPhone photo through the VHS recorder so you get the film grain in there, something like that. How long until slop becomes affectionately loved and reminisced about?

I think it's, yeah, it's gonna be kind of like the tape recorder. Taking photos on a film camera because it has like a specific vibe. I do think that people do gravitate to these like specific aesthetics and vibes. Totally. And maybe in like 5, I think you need a little bit of distance so that you're not traumatized by the software anymore. So maybe like 5 years, people will be like, ah, I really miss those italic fonts and purple gradients all over my page.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to the time, we had it so good in 2026. I just wanna go back to that era.

It was so good.

Well, do you think, last question, Anyone that has worked on building a brand or a product, I think early on in their career, they can have this frustration around the gap between their ability and their taste level. Do you think that's going away already? Because I even noticed historically, if I wanted to try to create, let's say 10 years ago, I wanted to create some type of render for a product, or a design for a product, I could go into Figma and make a version of it very, very quickly. And now, let's say I have an idea for a joke consumer product I want to send to John. Now I can basically one-shot a version of it that's pretty easy, and it feels like that gap, at least initially, has closed. Do you think that's the case, or are people's expectations just like, already much higher?

Generized. Yeah, I think, so I think people that love this mastery of the craft of design and that are like the peak of tastemakers, I think will always want to keep improving even their ability to create, to like keep up with their taste. But I think what we really don't realize is, especially now with AI, any person on earth can suddenly create, right? Like you, anyone can prompt, anyone can build something. And I think that group is a very large group that is producing a lot of volume. And if we can, again, both actually raise the skill to match people's tastes, but actually even help to maybe improve people's tastes and like show them, understand their taste better, or improve the things that they can create. And so their bar will get higher. I think that would be awesome. I think the craftsmanship will never go away of the people that are like at the peak of that field. But I do agree with you that I think you're gonna see this ability for you to suddenly match the level of taste that you maybe had. Mm-hmm. As a consumer, even though you weren't like an expert or professional like before.

Yeah.

Last question. Are you having to hire, are you having to convince people with taste to move to San Francisco or are you setting up satellite offices in New York and LA?

Bushwick and Austin.

I'm trying to convince a few to move. There is an amazing concentration of creatives in New York and I'm actually from Brazil originally. Brazil's also amazing like aesthetic. City. So yeah, we have, we have a couple of people that are spread out, but convincing a few to move.

That's great.

Awesome. Thank you so much.

Congrats on the, on the launch.

Congrats on the round. How much was it? How much did you raise?

$18.5 million. Woo!

There we go.

Congratulations. And thank you so much for taking the time. Sorry we couldn't do this yesterday, but I'm really glad we got to digest the story.

I'm going to have to convince Jordi Hays to like the name eventually. That's my one mission.

We'll get there.

No, no, I think you won him over just with the fact that you trademarked it a year ago.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought it was entirely unrelated to the discourse.

It's a discussion, but a year ago, you predicted this.

And I also like that I don't hate tasteful rage bait, you know?

You just have to deliver an actual product. I think this is—

The business case is more important than the rage bait. Yeah, you have to deliver on what you're selling.

Yeah.

And it has to be aligned. And I think that every lab, every AI company, They want tasteful outputs, and I think you're gonna do quite well. So yeah, great to meet you.

All right, let's raise the bar. Thank you for having me. This is a great one. Thanks.

We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Figma. Jordi mentioned it. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. And let me also tell you about Railway while our guest sits down. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite tools coordinated to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Our special guest today, we have David Senra here with us. How you doing, David? Good to see you.

Good to see you.

You need to totally adjust this. Oh, wait, no.

What are we doing here?

I think this is fine. We're doing them low because of the—

First pod? Yeah.

Move this over here. Yeah, first podcast. What was your most recent episode? You did Ed Catmull?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Oh, one of the best. Yeah, he's a good dude. Break it down, what was the biggest lesson? Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar?

Yeah, founder of Pixar. I mean, he's also like a graphics legend.

Catmull-Clark algorithm for subdividing meshes, I'm familiar.

Damn.

I love it.

I didn't even know that. Yeah, Catmull-Clark.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's an algorithm. If you have a box and you need to create more dimensions, more fidelity, you can use the Catmull-Clark algorithm.

He was cool enough to invite me to his house, which was really cool. Cool. And so that's where we recorded. Yeah. What I would say is like the weird thing that I shouldn't have been surprised at is like you ask him a question and every answer is in this beautiful full story.

Oh, yeah.

And so after I was like, "Oh, of course. He's one of the greatest storytellers of all time. Like, why wouldn't he speak that way?" That's great.

Yeah. What do you learn about founders from being in their homes?

That's a good question.

Do you go straight for the bookshelf?

Yeah, that I do automatically. I don't know. That's a good question. I don't know.

You gotta learn about architecture. Do like the Straussian reading of, you walk into someone and it looks like a castle and it looks like Vlad the Impaler lives there. That's gonna tell a different story than somebody who lives in a little farmhouse.

His house was a lot more normal than I would expect. I thought it was gonna have like weird shit everywhere and like little cartoons and stuff. But no.

Yeah. You got to think about what's on the walls. What do they choose to put on their walls, the type of art?

He lives in a very beautiful—

And how reflective they are in their careers. There's some people that put up their movie star. They put up their own movie posters. Other people, even though they rise to the highest heights, they might still be fans of other creators or other people or their contemporaries. Or they might have— Roman statues, because he's obsessed with the Roman Empire.

Oh, so that's a good— I've hung out at Jimmy Iovine's house a bunch of times. And he famously says, he doesn't have a trophy room. He doesn't have a rearview mirror. He doesn't even like talking about his past. So there's nothing in his house. You wouldn't even know what he does, other than he's very fucking rich.

Yeah.

That's funny. And what's the latest on the podcast industry, podcast growth? Are you seeing any— Do you think there'll be any knock-on effects from like, have you been tracking what's going on in Hollywood where they're digging through Reddit to adapt stories from YouTubers? Have you been tracking that?

No, no, no, tell me about this.

So there's 3 breakout movies this summer, "Obsession," "Backrooms," and "Iron Lung," all 3 created by YouTubers, independent creators. Sort of like, you know, Hollywood sort of turned their back on these folks, like they didn't have direct pipeline lines into the traditional media world. And yet, they all had blockbuster films in the span of a few months. And I'm just wondering if you're seeing any hints from like the Spotifys of the world, the Netflixes of the world, where there might be more appetite to take what we started here, independent creators, and start funneling them into the traditional into the traditional workflows?

God, I hope not. You hope not?

Yeah, right.

Why? I think that one of the cool things about podcasting is just like how independent and almost like punk rock it is. I've spent obviously a bunch of time with the Spotify guys, you know?

Yeah.

I was just with them in New York, because I just recorded one with Gustav. And then a few days later, I had breakfast with the co-CEO and head of podcasts, Roman. And they've told me multiple times when their initial podcast strategy— I think they wound up firing the lady that was running it. Her idea was like, let's take this thing that is doesn't cost any money, and the people who started it would do it for free, and they did it when no one was listening. And let's get Michelle Obama or fucking Prince Harry to do this. And it turns out, one, it was super expensive. Two, no one listened because they didn't even care.

Yeah.

So, yeah. Actually, a couple days ago, I was in New York. And no disrespect to this guy, but there was this investment banker, I guess, who's trying to— I guess he sold a few podcasts, and he's done a bunch of media. And I was just like—— we didn't even eat— kind of like disgusted with— he was talking about something that I love, that I care deeply about, something I think is genuinely a miracle. And it's just like, well, how do we like package it together and like sell it to PE? And I wanted to vomit.

Extremely bearish for the slat wall industry.

Oh, and they brought you up too. And I was like, you don't have to tell me about those guys. I happen to know them.

Extremely bearish for the slat wall industry. What do you think about podcast aesthetics, designs? If I'm starting a solo show, should I put a bookcase behind me?

No, you know what?

So you know what we might do? So you know the guy that does my clips, Maxim, right? Yeah. He wants to start doing a brand identity and video episodes for founders.

Sure.

And I think we're going to do a pixel-by-pixel recreation of Steve Jobs' home office.

Ooh, that's fun. I've seen that image.

Yeah, exactly. It's kind of messy, and he's standing up. 'cause he's got a big computer there, but he's got shit on the floor. It's like something you actually use.

Yeah, that story's sort of apocryphal, right? Because it's a picture of Steve Jobs' home office, and people compare it to a picture of Tim Cook in the Apple office, and they're like, this tells you everything about how different they are. But the nuance there is that you haven't seen Tim Cook's home office. You don't know what it's like. And of course, if Vanity Fair is coming in with a team of photographers, photographers, the Apple PR department's probably gonna tidy up Tim's office.

But also like doing like a pixel by pixel like recreation, and then like, it's like if you know, you know. Like you have to be like deep into lore of business history.

I feel like the Acquired guys are doing well on that path. The In the Garage episode, I don't know if you saw that.

With Michael Lewis?

Yeah, exactly. And so that idea, I think that they have a huge amount of untapped upside in the set design of those worlds if they actually build a world around. Nike, when they're doing the Nike episode.

Okay, so—

I think they're gonna have a huge video opportunity.

I have a little different perspective on some of this. It's just like, for, I think, normal people podcasts, this like heavy investment into sets, like, could make a lot of sense.

Yeah.

'Cause like normal people are sitting around watching. It's just like—

Sure.

What I would say is like, for people building business podcasts, it's like, if you have an audience of entrepreneurs investors, like, what do they actually want? They want, like, useful information that they can then apply to their business or some kind of inspiration. Like, so get that part down first. For the first 9 years of Founders, there was— there wasn't any— there wasn't video at all, and it, like, thrived. Uh, obviously on my new show, like, we— you actually played a huge role for this. We started shooting at 3 cameras, and John's like, what is this bullshit? You should do 5. And we just recorded one with MrBeast that won't be out for a few months, but we 6 cameras and a drone.

Why not 11?

No, I mean, yeah, I guess you could, but I think 5— I think 5 seems to be like a thing. Turn it up. So like, you, you can make them beautiful, but I'm saying like you have to nail—

Do we have 11 cameras here? We have Gon Cam.

You have—

I was like, in the production, you have 9 back there. I noticed I was—

we have 10 or 11 cameras when I'm sitting behind your production crew. There's 3 different cameras on me just standing back there.

Yeah, yeah.

So yeah, this— I was saying, have you You guys ever seen the picture of when Steve Jobs convinces Bill Gates to give Apple $150 million?

Yes, yes, we're gonna put—

And I was like, hey, this is the first time—

We'll put Andrew Huberman up there talking to you guys.

This is the first time I've been here since the big screen. Like, what do you think?

It's pretty great, it's pretty great, right?

I go, I love it. I go, but you know you can go bigger. I just showed them a picture.

I was like, just plug it in the back.

But this is modular. You can add panels to this without actually needing to buy a whole new system.

Yeah, yeah.

History of talent wars. Is anything, you know, the iconic, it's the email exchange between Steve and the CEO of Adobe, right? Adobe, yeah. Saying like, "We have different policies on this. One of them needs to change." Is anything else come to mind? I can imagine a number of history's greatest entrepreneurs that were willing to just become enemies with another one of the greats purely because they realized that talent is everything.

Yeah, I would say, like, if you're the kind of person that gets to the very top of your profession, you're highly likely, like, have some degree of ruthlessness to you, ruthlessness to them. Joseph Pulitzer is basically the inventor of everything that we're kind of doing now. I'm actually just reading if you've read his biography, it's like, he tried to merge his newspaper with his little brother's newspaper. And his little brother's like, "No, I don't need to do this." And Joseph's like, "Well, you have to understand, you're not even making your own newspaper, so you shouldn't be so cocksure," is the word he used. And he goes, "'Cause what happens if, to the people that are like actually making the newspaper, what if they go away?" And his younger brother's name's Albert. He's like, "They're not going to." That night, Pulitzer raided his little brother's entire staff and recruited them all.

Why?

Yeah.

And did, and do you remember what happened after that?

Yeah, I think the larger, we can go into this one second, I think the larger point here is just like, I'm not saying like you should, it's very clear, like when I'm, especially when we're making Founders Podcast, like I'm not saying you should have these traits yourself, you should just know that these people do, and you can choose to, if you wanna work with them, or compete with them, or whatever the case is, you shouldn't be surprised at what they're doing, He would literally do anything to win. He would sacrifice relationships, ethics, morals, anything. He wants to win.

The surprise about Pulitzer is most people learn about Pulitzer from the Pulitzer Prize, which is awarded to the best journalistic efforts, the most groundbreaking investigative journalism.

Or the best writing.

But that's not how Pulitzer made his money, right? He was a muckraking journalist, a tabloid newspaper guy. Is that correct?

Him and William Randolph Hearst get into this huge circulation war in New York. Same thing, William Randolph Hearst idolized him. He was like 15 years younger. He did the same thing that Pulitzer did to his little brother. He raided Pulitzer. Pulitzer went blind. And now you're competing with somebody that is blind. And so William Randolph Hearst is like, I'm taking all your shit, man.

Steve's taking it for real?

Did he just go to the office and just kind of sneak around and just whisper?

No, so this is not— I should not be like this. I'm laughing at this other than everybody knows I have a giant head. And so this part was hilarious to me where if he, later in life, last two decades of his life, he's blind.

I never really noticed you had a giant head, but now that you say that, really up here, it's tremendous.

Yeah. Well, where do you think all this information's stored?

Yeah.

So anyways, when he'd meet anyone who was blind, he'd come over here. He would like wanna feel your face, right? Whoa. And then eventually he goes up the cranium and then this one guy, he goes, "My God." "you have a giant head, sir." I left that part out of the podcast, but it was in the book.

But the quality of his work, he was not—

No, yellow journalism. He's the inventor of overly sensational—

Yep, clickbait.

It's fucking social media. It's like sex, violence. You're worried about stuff that has no effect on your day-to-day life, but it can spread everywhere.

Interesting, interesting.

What entrepreneurs do you think could be defined as cult leaders? Are all of history's greatest entrepreneurs cult leaders? Or are there some that are just humble merchants that like making better products cheaper?

I think, that's funny. I actually just, when I was with the Spotify guys, they said they like pull my data, and I never— you guys know I don't like look at data. I don't care like how many people listen. I just like wanna make—

Yeah, it's quality, not quantity.

I like what you said about taste. Let's go back to that next. I saw the clip yesterday. I thought that observation you made yesterday was very astute.

Yeah.

And so they wound up pulling the data, and they compared the two shows, and then what happens when people listen to both shows. But basically, they're like, "You don't have a podcast. You have a cult." Like, the retention is fucking crazy.

Yeah.

I think anybody that gets really good at what they do and has a differentiated point of view. Like, James Dyson, I spent time with him, right? He's maybe my number one hero. Personality-wise, he doesn't come across like messianic in the way like Steve Jobs would, but his products have a cult-like following.

Sure, sure, sure.

So, like, there's that example. And then there's just people that have just unbelievably, you know, god levels of charisma, like Steve Jobs or Henry Kaiser or people like that.

What about family businesses? Is that less cult-like in the organization itself.

No, it's probably more, because I'm obsessed with these people that have— they own 100% of the business. You've never heard of them. I've met a bunch of them. In many cases, they'll print hundreds of millions for themselves every year, or like billions, just cash. It's like, oh, what was your paycheck this year? Fucking $3 billion. And you've never heard of these people. But they have entire worlds, like a world within the world.

Midjourney.

Yeah, maybe.

Birth of the next one. Maybe. He's like, "Oh, oh, oh, it only made a couple hundred million.

I'm reserving judgment." That's not what I mean.

No, no, no, it's not a dynasty. It's not a dynasty yet.

Yeah, these people have been running their business for multiple decades, longer than most of the founders we know have been alive. It's just a different thing. It wasn't a derogatory—

No, no, no, I know. It's just funny, 'cause I know you have an extremely high bar for these things. Taste. Good or bad? Do you like taste?

No, I—

Where do you stand on this?

I think Jordi's observation about people misunderstanding what it is, it's just like it was something that was personal to you and differentiated to you. I think I went on somebody else's podcast recently. I went on Brian Halligan's podcast. And he was asking me about you guys. It's just like they came into this industry that I love, that I think I study more than anybody else in the world. And it's just— it wasn't like they were 10x better marketers. They were like 100 or 1,000 better, like the next best fucking marketer in podcasting. And that came from your personal taste. And then what happens is when people copy it, you see poor imitations. They can copy what they see, but they don't actually understand.

Yeah, something's only tasteful once.

Yeah, it's hard.

And I think, again, it should be tailored to this person. I think in like 7 days, I wound up recording conversations with— I think it was 7 or 10 days, something like that— Dana White, Ed Catmull, and Rick Rubin.

Rick Rubin.

And think about it. It's like one builds the largest combat organization in the world. One is the top of his profession, essentially like the consigliere to musicians and all kinds of people. Essentially gets paid to be himself. And then Ed Catmull is making movies.

You're a scientist.

And the theme through all of those, when you talk to them— and I didn't understand that going in— —even though I've studied all of them, and in many cases made multiple founders episodes on all of them, too—it's like, oh, they're just building the product they want to use, that they want to see. Like, Ed Catmull was making the movies he wants to watch. Dana White wants to put on the fights that he wants to watch. And Rick Rubin makes the music he wants to listen to.

Yeah.

And I think that is a key to having taste. It can't just be like, oh, I'm going to get taste through an API or something. It's just like, what is— James Dyson has a great line about this. He's like, "The root principle is to do things your way." This is what drives me fucking crazy about podcasts, the question you said earlier. It's like, "Oh, I wanna make podcasts 'cause now you can get really, really rich making a podcast, so I'm gonna go scour Reddit for an idea." Right. It's like, you don't have an idea in your head?

Yeah.

Like, you're doing it for the wrong reasons.

Yeah.

I think it's very important to like ask people why they're doing what they're doing. That's another Steve Jobs quote. He's just like, "The older I get, the more I understand that motivations matter." Have you read the latest Tim Ferriss blog post about his nonfiction sales declining?

Have you tracked this at all?

Do you think I did?

It's interesting.

Pugh, and you know me really well.

Do you think I even saw this?

I know you watched the fight on Sunday. No!

What?

No, I was like on a— I can't remember where it was Sunday. No, no, I'm going to rewatch them now.

I'll rewatch them with you.

You watch them at your house?

Live, yeah. You were there? I was locked— no, no, no.

Oh, OK.

Live with—

No, no, I was like flying or traveling. I don't remember where I was Sunday, but there was a reason I couldn't see it. It was very upsetting to me. What were we saying right before that, though? Before the fights?

Tim Ferriss just shared some data on his— he has multiple New York Times bestsellers, and he's been seeing sales decline. And he sort of framed it as like some of the books that he's written, he describes has lookup tables for information. Like, one of them just has a lot of recipes. And so recipes—

Oh, I have that book. For Our Chef.

For Our Chef. That's right.

Yeah. Tools of Titans or Tools for Titans was like, you can get that kind of content from a prompt right now, which is like, OK, what was Steve Jobs' philosophy on product?

Yeah. Is this just for how-to? To books? Or is like, I'd be very curious if the trend of people buying books is also going down.

Well, the number of books published is tripling. You're not helping.

Why?

You're helping. I buy a ton of books. I know, I know, but you're doing such good summaries that sometimes I'm sure people listen to.

No, I sell a ton of books.

Yeah, you sell a ton of books. And you service books that are—

I make over 10,000 a year just for people using the link, like—

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you service books that are— Like it's not a substitute for the product, but—

Well, I don't know, I mean, friends of Morgan Housel, like his books, his Psychology of Money book has been out for like 5 years. I think it's selling more now than it ever has.

I can imagine that. Yeah, there's some sort of divide there because you could go to an AI system and ask for like, teach me about the psychology of money. You could go tell me a fiction story. Now maybe it's not as good, but when you're compiling information into a book, this was sort of Tim Ferriss's reflection as well. He was saying that a book that categorizes information, collects information specifically, might not be as competitive in the future.

I like Tim. I've been reading his— "The 4-Hour Workweek" I read when I was in college, when it first came out. I went on his podcast recently, and I think that conversation we had. But I would also say it's like, I would want to see data when it's not tied to your audience.

Oh, sure.

So he took a break from his podcast for a little bit. —like, his audience might be different than it was.

Yeah, that's true.

You see what I'm saying? In a sense that we're just pure author, like a Morgan Housel. I guess he has a big audience on X too. I'd be curious to see.

Also, it's interesting that "The 4-Hour Workweek" was like a meme and an idea, and maybe it was a strategy or just somewhere that you got the content from.

You know, this is the first time I've seen Dylan in person.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Well, here he is.

Are you moving to LA or what?

Come on.

He never knows. He never knows.

But I don't think— I don't think if you asked a bunch of, you know, young people today, like, do you think working 4 hours a week is gonna get you to your goals? I don't think anyone— I don't think that— I think, like, the meme is now, like, you have 2 years kind of thing, you know? Like, you gotta lock in. And, like, locking in is, like, somewhat at odds with just working for 4 hours from the tropics.

I would say the— this is again where I think nothing we're doing is new. So, if you go back and like, "Why do you guys have this like cult-like following? Why do you have so many people that root for you, that love you?" It's like they don't look at you as like a public figure or God forbid a celebrity. They're like, "Oh, these are my friends, John and Jordi," even if they've never met them before. Like I was hiking this morning and this guy was coming down and like I thought he was talking to himself, but I have like— obviously I'm not— I'm like locked in. I have headphones in and he's me like waves and stuff. But I was like, "Maybe he's just waving to somebody else or whatever." He chased me up the fucking hill. I got to the hill and like he wanted to come and talk to me because he's been listening to the podcast for years. So, I think, again, I get a lot of my information from LMs now, right? Uh-huh. I definitely think it's— it can be a substitute or a threat or, you know, diminish the amount of people listen to your podcast. But I also think podcasting done for people that actually love it, it's much more like relationship-based. And the reason I bring up Oprah is because I did this episode on her a few years ago and she just like, she realized she was on to something weird because like she had like Tom Cruise on her show and people were like, "Oh my God, you're my favorite movie star." But they'd come up to her and they're like, "Hey, you wanna come to my house for lunch?" It's like that's not the same relationship that you have with someone. It's a very deep, almost like friend relationship.

Yeah, we saw her do an interview and it was electric. It was like watching LeBron James.

A master.

Did you wear it? Yeah, it was crazy.

That Katzenberg thing?

Yeah.

OK, I saw her at Delsta.

How do you— what's your process for getting better at your craft?

It's just reps, reps, reps.

Consistency.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do think there is something to do with like, I've been trying to essentially say, OK, I don't want an episode of Founders, for example, to be longer than an hour. And even the new show, some of the conversations I was having were like 2 and a 2 and a half, 3 hours. And I'm like, "I kinda wanna see if I can just like get the— get all the stuff that I want out of this person's brain in like an hour, hour and 10." So now I have like the guy that's running my camera, he gives me like an hour warning. Now, if the conversation is still going or if there's still stuff I wanna learn and understand, I'll keep it going, but I try to keep them really, really tight. That was something that Pulitzer did too. I remember, 'cause I first read his biography like 5, 6 years ago, is they used to have these newspapers that were bounded by page length. And it was like, "You got 4 pages, buddy. So, like, you have— you better put the best news on these 4 pages. You can't go above 4 pages." So, I think designing in constraints. I think reps. You were just on the phone with Rob. Rob told me, 'cause I saw him in Italy.

Yeah.

And the team is over there for a wedding. And obviously, I flew back as soon as I could. And he said—

Obviously.

He said you called him. He's like, "David." He's like, "Senna has to be going crazy for not podcasting for 2 weeks." Yeah. Yeah. I feel I feel the difference. I've been like so busy that sometimes I'll let founders slip. Instead of every 7 days, it's like every 10 or every, God forbid, like 14. And I feel the difference. So, like, it really is just reps, reps, reps, and just staying in the pocket over and over again. And again, doing it because you actually want to do it. Like, you know, on the new show, like, I feel very sad when I don't podcast. I could easily, if I had an entrepreneur in front of me, and this is what we're working on now, is stuffing the top of our funnel. Right. You put me with an entrepreneur that I'm intensely interested in, I could have a conversation like that every day. For sure. It's not work. It's like something I'm like completely obsessed with. So, I think that's really it.

What have you learned about podcasting from Andrew Huberman?

I don't know. I don't know if I've learned anything from Andrew. The only person I've ever come across where that I'm like, fuck, this guy knows more than I do, is Roman, the head of podcasts at Spotify. To the point where I'm like, dude, I will fly to Germany once a quarter just to have lunch with you.

Interesting.

Yeah, and we were completely—

But he doesn't have a podcast. No, but he's— He's purely on business.

The person running their podcast before— again, this is like, your motivations matter. It's like, what's that famous Josh Kushner quote where he's just like, if you have 'You have to pick the person that has the most experience, the most resources, or who wants it most.' You always pick the person that wants it most. This guy wants it more than anyone else. He's an unabashed, like, podcast fiend. And then he's got this god-level view of podcasting. And so I just fucking—

The only Josh Kushner quote that I know off the top of my head is, 'What if it all goes right?' That's a great one too.

Default optimism.

It's a great one.

Yeah, default optimism. It's all I think.

I think— I think what— I think Rob Moore would be a better person to ask that question to.

Sure.

Because he's now working with both me and Andrew.

Of course. Of course.

And what he says, he's like, there's only two people in all of podcasting that can do a solo episode, can crush as a guest and interview. And he's like, it's just you and Andrew.

Hat trick.

Oh, Patrick won't— oh yeah, Patrick doesn't do solo episodes.

Maybe it was Colossus Productions.

No, no, I'm just saying hat trick. Three.

Oh, I said Patrick.

Oh, no, Patrick.

So did I. What is the second one?

Solo episode, can crush as a guest, and you're a new person.

Oh, as a guest. That's right. Yeah, yeah. That's rare. Yeah, as a guest. The triple threat.

But no, I think a lot of this is what Jordi was asking when you just went to the bathroom. Part of it is like, I mean, I think you guys are like this. You don't really look around to other podcasters to what you should be doing. There's a line by The Weeknd where he's just like, competition? I don't even listen. It's just like, 'cause then you wanna limit. I spent time with, you know the company, Bending Spoons?

Yeah.

So I spent time with Luca Ferrari in Sweden. He's been on the show. Yeah, yeah. He's a, what you realize about him is like, and let me get to Dana White too about this.

I see a large IPO on the horizon.

The Bending Spoons?

They're going out in the next couple of weeks.

I just texted him, he's coming on the show, but he's like, I can't do it right now. 'Cause right now I'm in my quiet period.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So—

You can record though.

But he's—

Friendly IPL.

He literally doesn't pay attention to anything else, so he's got like a Galápagos Island version of company building.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Like the way he approaches it, and the conversation we had that one night was just like, oh, you're an interesting dude. And Dana White, I would say, is the exact same. The exact same, so we got along like amazing. And then we hung out a bunch afterwards, and—— he said the funniest thing. Because somebody texted me, they're like, dude, I love the episode, but you missed a big opportunity. I'd love to know what books influenced Dana. And I screenshotted this text between me and somebody else. Dana had told me after we started recording. He's just like, I've never read a book, and I've never listened to a podcast.

Never read a book. Amazing.

Because, again, go back to taste.— like, he was obsessed with boxing before he got into combat, into MMA. And then he was managing fighters. And then he saw the opportunity to buy the UFC for $2 million out of bankruptcy, essentially, press of bankruptcy. And then all he did is just like, "I'm the biggest fan of this. Like, I should just make what I wanna see." Yeah. And he said, I think, on the episode, he's like, "We never did production. I didn't know how to— camera. I didn't know anything." He's just like, "I just figured, 'Okay, what do I wanna see?' and let's just work backwards from that." Yeah.

Yeah, I was talking to a buddy who spent 20 years in cable TV, and he was asking like, what is our routine? And the traditional cable route to do, you know, a few hours of television is so wildly different than at least what we do. They typically, if they're going live at 4:00 PM, they have a 7:00 AM meeting where they're going over, they're going over what the show is gonna look like. Everybody's kind of aligning. And I was like, well, we show up at 9:00 AM, and then at 10:55, the production team says 5 minutes and hits a countdown, and everything has to happen basically in that sub-2 hours.

Yeah, I think this is another thing that I learned.

And if I had gone, if we had gone and like read the book on television, We probably would have started that. We would have been starting the show.

I listened to the Johnny Carson episode, Founders.

Yeah, I know, but that didn't influence the schedule of the show. And that, to me, that's understanding the person.

It influenced me in the sense that I was more comfortable with you permanently living in Malibu because Johnny Carson did.

I fucking called this. Do you remember a year and a half ago, I was like, most people make generational wealth and then move to Malibu. Jordi, you're going to create generational wealth from Malibu. I called, did I not? Do you remember that conversation? I forgot about that.

I did when I moved there. I was like, damn, I retired too early. I told you. I seriously went through like a 1-year period where I was like, what did I do?

I remember.

I'm like, there's like, because everyone, all my friends All my friends in Malibu, I love them dearly, they'll text me like, "Tuesday, 11 AM." Going to the beach.

Like, "You down to surf right now?" And I'm like, "Brother, brother, I'm trying to work." I gotta tell you what happened to me there the other day. People say stuff to me on the street all the time, but this guy in Malibu said the funniest shit I ever heard. I'll get to it in one second. I want to say about your process, what you just said comparing and contrasting how corporate TV does it and you guys do it. Another thing that Ed Catmull would talk about, him and Steve Jobs, is he understood that the creative process was in large parts an absence of process. And so if you think, OK, this is how TV is done, 7:00 AM, 8:00 AM, 10:15, I have to do X, Y, and Z. It's just like, that's too much process. And it's like, if you want to be really creative, it's going to be absence of process. So I was walking across the street, maybe around Malibu, maybe I wasn't there, and this entrepreneur who sold his company— like you said, everybody there has He's already exited.

Yeah.

So he's driving his truck, his windows are down, he's got his surfboards in the back, he's going to surf, and he slams on the brake in the middle of the highway, or the middle of the road, and he just sticks his head out the window and he goes, "Senra, you dog!" And the rest of the day I said that for like 10, I kept saying it over and over, "Senra, you dog!" You dog!

That shit was hilarious.

That's funny.

Dude, I forgot about that. Yeah, you created generational wealth, and you're still going.

Yeah, I'm still going.

You're still going.

Still going.

It's a good time.

Still going. No, that was very rough. In the first year moving there, I loved it, but I was constantly on Zillow looking at places that weren't there.

Where?

No, I just felt like I was shooting myself in the foot by not being around. People that were in the same state of mind that I was in, which was very much like on the hunt.

Do you have that belief still?

No, I mean, part of the beauty of TBPN, it was like the only business in technology that I felt like I could actually build while having that as my primary residence. Not even like venture capital. Like, do you really wanna back the, would you wanna back the VC who's gonna tell you I'm gonna spend 100 and 200 days in Malibu next year.

Or the company, the company.

No, no, no, VC too, VC too, because I know plenty of VCs that have a place in Malibu, but many of them have a place in SF or New York.

The larger point, maybe let me refine my question, is do you feel that you have to be around people that are chasing the same thing as you are, or do you think there's a benefit to actually being separate from that?

Not anymore. I like going and going to a barbecue with my family and like our friends.

No, no, no, I'm not talking about you specifically. Do you think that's necessary, not just for you, but for founders?

Yeah, always go where the action is. If you're a first-time tech founder, move to San Francisco, live really close to all the big companies because that will be your employees those will be your friends, those will be your investors. Obviously, go where the action is almost always.

Yeah, I think just my personality type is more like loner kind of thing where it's just like—

But you have a unique business. You don't need to hire, you don't really need to hire people.

You're not trying to poach from the labs and the big tech companies constantly. You heard that story about Mark Zuckerberg making soup for AI research? Or something like that.

I didn't hear that story.

It's hard, yeah, if you're not— like, the reason Adobe and Steve Jobs were going back and forth at Apple was because they were right across the town from each other. It'd be a lot different if one of them was asleep at the wheel.

Yeah, I think if, like, power laws rule everything around us, and differentiation is key, I think maybe separating yourself from that— I mean, Microsoft started in a strip mall in Albuquerque. Amazon. John, like, he drove cross-country from New York after quitting D.E. Shaw and set up in Seattle. There are a bunch of historical examples. I don't think there's a hard and fast rule for it.

Yeah, of course. Not a hard and fast rule.

And I think the weirder the idea is— I mean, James Dyson owns 100% of a company that is one of the largest, most valuable privately held companies in the world. And he did it in a carriage house in Bath, England.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

I thought it was all Santa Barbara.

Am I wrong about that?

Dyson? Dyson's fucking from the UK, brother.

Oh, I'm thinking Sonos or something, maybe.

Yeah. Sonos.

I don't know, somebody's on the beach.

Yeah.

What's the oldest entrepreneur you've ever covered? Have you ever done anyone from like the 17th century?

Oh, you meant— I thought you meant oldest age.

Not age.

Because that's probably Henry Leland.

Sorry.

So Henry Leland founded Cadillac at 16, founded Lincoln Motors at 70.

You got to do Workday.

Yeah.

Founder Workday. I think the guy was maybe 60, 65.

Really? Yeah.

There was a guy from the 1500s, his name was like—

You did an episode about a founder from the 1500s?

I don't think he's that good.

Does he go loom or something?

No, his last name was like fucker, but it's not, it's Fugger, Jacob Fugger. Okay. Jacob Fugger.

Today we're profiling the founder—

Can you find out the name of the book for me? I think it's like The Richest Man That Ever Lived or something like that.

The founder who created the wheel. F-U-G-G-E-R.

The richest man who ever lived.

There you go. The richest man who ever lived. Yeah. Yeah. But he's more of a financier, and I think those kind of—

I think you might have to update the title. Elon's on a run right now.

Yeah.

It might be any day now.

Yeah, maybe so. But yeah, that's less interesting to me than somebody building a product.

Yeah.

Than just some guy figuring out ways to turn piles of money into bigger piles of money.

How valuable is it for the new show interviewing founders who are sort of like on to the next thing, post-exit, little bit more free, almost pseudo-retired? I'm just thinking about between like Ed Cuttmore, Rick Rubin, Dana White. Like, Dana White has like a schedule. He has a book to talk. He has a plan. He has a next fight to promote versus Rick Rubin and Ed Catmull can sort of reflect on a body of work a little bit more?

I mean, Rick's still working every day. I mean, he had the great— there's a clip from there, like, in "Firewalk," called, like, "Lazy Workaholic." Yeah, that's a great coinage. Yeah, I don't think in those terms. I just think of, like, is the person sitting across from me— like, I've invited and recorded podcasts with some of our mutual friends, and their response to me is like— and they're not out. I've done, like, I don't know, like, 14 or 15 that I've recorded, I haven't put out yet, something like that. Maybe 12. And they're like, why? Strategic reserve. No, no, no. Just I'm addicted, and I have to do this more. And so—

No, I know. But it's good that there is a strategic reserve of founder interviews, God forbid.

But originally, they were like, oh, I don't fit in with the Dell or Ek. I'm like, not everybody's going to be a deca-billionaire. It's just like, that's not the rubric. It's like, do you have a singular career? And am I intensely interested in you? Interested in having a conversation with you. And 'cause I'm doing these for selfish reasons. It's just like I'm trying to, there's like shit in your head that I want out that would benefit me. And I just assume that everybody listening, there's like 10 million me's out there, or a million me's out there, that are interested in the exact same things that I'm interested in. Like, you know Ravi Gupta? You had Ravi on the podcast.

We've had him on. Gupta-nator.

Yeah, I ran into him in Miami. I think this is right after, I forgot which episode dropped.

Really buff and that's like the best cover art. You remember? Yeah.

Yeah. But they made him like yellow. I remember. I was in a group chat with him and Patrick. And he's like, what the fuck is this? But anyways, Ravi—

I think John is joking because we—

You made him. I saw.

We made a version of him that was enhanced.

No, he's talking about his skin color in the one I'm talking about. But I ran into Ravi randomly outside a restaurant in Miami. And he had mentioned just a little bit. Listening to or watching one of the episodes of the new show, and what he said was interesting. He's like, man, it really annoys me how good you're getting at this, because you know exactly when to interrupt and ask a question for your audience.

That's interesting.

And I go, thanks for, I guess, the compliment. But I go, I don't think about the audience at all. I'm interrupting and asking questions for me. And I just assume that you have the exact same interests that I I do, and you're gonna wanna know the answers to that question.

Yeah, yeah.

Again, it goes back to like taste and having a perspective and a point of view. And there's some people that hate the fact that I interrupt.

Yeah.

Okay, there's 464,000 other podcasts in the business category.

Take a hike.

Go grab one of those.

Take a hike. Do any of the guests get annoyed by that or give you feedback about that? Because you gotta care about them, right? The guest experience matters.

No. Yes, but no. They understand. Most of the— especially for the first ones, they were fans of mine. They listened to Founders for years. And they know that we're both obsessed with the same thing, which is learning from history as a form of leverage. Yeah. And no. In many cases, they've texted me after the fact. They're like, I've been on a ton of other podcasts, and you met my nerdy enthusiasm. He's like, they're not used to somebody being so into what they're talking about. And so no, I don't think so.

Yeah. It's interesting. We talk over each other all the time when we're just hanging out. And sometimes we get comments like, oh, stop talking over each other. But that was—

It's authentic.

But it was purely enforced from the audience. We didn't know that we were doing it the first time we got called out for talking over each other. And we were like, wait, who are they talking about? Is John talking over Jordi, or Jordi talking over John?

'Cause we both do it.

'Cause we both do it. And so we were like, and we took a very different approach. We were like, okay, this is feedback from the customer. Customer's the audience. Like, we probably should think about this.

And now I think—

At least be aware of it.

At least be aware of it.

You guys just talk over each other.

Yeah, we do, but we're a little bit better. I mean, we're a little bit better.

No, I would say like, —having, like, when we hang out, you guys do that too? Yeah. So, like, just do that.

Yeah.

Because he's like, somebody will— you cannot listen to— Dana White would talk about this. He's like, you can't listen to the comments. They'll be like, "This fight was awesome." The same exact fight, "This is the worst fight ever." It's like, your audience is big enough that you're gonna hear conflicting opinions on literally every single thing you do.

Yeah.

Like, I have a good friend of mine who did the "How to Take Over the World" podcast. And he started wanting to add sound effects to it. And he loves like very dramatic music and stuff. And so he goes, "Hey, can I get your advice on this?" And he sent me this like Twitter thread of people commenting on the fact that now he has sound elements. People complain about this.

There you go. No one complains about the flashbangs.

No, there's some people out there that— Oh, really? There's every sound effect we have, there's someone out there, there's someone out out there that wants it off the board.

No way.

I pay attention.

Are these just smoke grenade heads? Are they just smoke grenade fans? Or like pure smoke grenade heads?

No, there was people that like, they hate the laugh track.

Okay, yeah.

And that's fair. I could see some situations.

But there's probably people out there that will also comment and say they love it.

Yeah.

So it's like, yeah.

Is that Lil Jon?

That's right.

But my point being is like, in—

In Ben's. Jordi Hays, like 20.

In Ben's thread, it was like, the music's awesome, keep doing it. The music sucks, stop. It's like, so what do you do there? What is this?

Do a little check mark.

The check mark is—

Why the fuck do I look so tan on that?

What's up with the lighting here? We got lighting, we have color grade, we got all sorts of stuff. Yeah, that's a swear jar.

I've given up, man. Like every time I come on here—

You're the only guest. I used to try pretty hard not to swear.

We need to lock this behind an age-gated paywall. We need to do KYC on The Center episodes.

Oh, so, okay, that's another complaint I get all the time. Yeah, yeah. Why do you swear so much? I make podcasts for entrepreneurs.

Okay.

You ever talk to one?

Yeah, yeah, they swear. Most of them are mature and adults, but yeah.

No, Elon said in the Isaacson biography, his favorite word is fuck. That's in print.

But you can't, I mean, Elon is singular. He also has sort of a different framework for what is, I think that's—

Ed Campbell.

I think a normal entrepreneur shouldn't be like, well, Elon does this thing where, you know, he does something that's maybe not politically correct, so I can do it too. It's like, not necessarily gonna work as well for you as it does for the singular.

An 80-year-old gentleman. And the clip that we just put out there, he's like, most companies say they want the truth and they're full of shit. Like, he's not. That's just how you talk. It's how you speak.

Yeah. I had something else. Oh, GTA 6 cover art has been revealed. Team's excited. Releasing on November 19th.

Let me see. Can you put up on the big screen or no?

It's on the timeline.

We can put it up. You can see that.

When was it released?

The release, the reveal was today, but—

The funniest quote from the Strauss Zelnick—

That's what I was going to ask you about.

First of all, I used your Power Law podcast episode. Thank you for sending me the prep, by the way. It was very, very helpful. The funniest quote I saw from that, or the funniest comment I saw from the Strauss Zelnick episode I did was, "Those eyes have seen GTA 6." You know, he caught salmonella poisoning. So, like, within 3 hours of us finishing the interview, he was, like, debilitated and stuck in the hospital.

Oh, you told me about that. Yeah, he was sick. Yeah, yeah.

That's crazy.

Yeah. Thank God it happened 3 hours later.

He was really well. I saw a whole 20-minute reaction video to your interview with him, talking, praising him for being, like, the only sane CEO right now in the world of AI. AI because he gave like very logical, very inspiring answers to the questions of how they'll use AI, but there's still a role for this and that. And it was like so balanced and it's not what you're getting from a lot of AI leaders these days or a lot of CEOs.

What did you think of his, he definitely has a different opinion on it. What did you think of his like take on that?

Oh, I think he's 100% right. But I just think that a lot of people see the stock market as unfairly punishing them And if they needed to do some layoffs from overhiring a couple of years ago, they can do it and say, oh, it's because so much AI. We already saw this with the whole Klarna saga where there was like a, oh, we're not using Salesforce anymore. And then you watch and you see Anthropic literally hiring Salesforce admins. Clearly, there's some revealed preference going on there. And yeah, I think he's the one that— he just doesn't have to talk that specific book. He's appealing to creatives, gamers, his customers, the executives that he works with. He's not as beholden to some broad narrative. He actually did go through a SaaS-pocalypse for a little bit. Everyone was— you talked to him about this— how everyone was saying, "Oh, you're just gonna be able to one-shot prompt a game." And he's like, "That's not what makes the games." Yeah.

Profitable.

Yeah.

And so a lot of the business leaders, maybe even if they do understand, they have an economic incentive not to reveal the truth about their business, which is that maybe their mode is something completely different than what people think it is. And maybe they don't wanna reveal that. And so they don't want to let you know how they really make money or how locked in the customers. I mean, this is the famous, what is it, Teal line, like the monopolist says the competition's never been fiercer. And then the entrepreneur in the perfectly competitive market says, "We have a monopoly." Yeah. Where, you know, no one can compete with us.

Yeah, I mean, there's a ton of CEOs and founders I've talked to privately, and what they say publicly about AI is completely different than what they're saying.

It's like, "It's job creation." It's like, "That's not what you said last week." Do you keep a list of people that you meet now that you think will have do you think you'll have biographies about them in 20, 30 years?

No. No.

'Cause I think you should. 'Cause I assume you're gonna be—

How far— this is an interesting question. How far ahead do you guys look?

What?

Like, in your life, your career, like— I'll talk to some people and they're like, "What's your, like, tenure—" My plans are measured in centuries. Yeah. People say that usually have wildly unprofitable companies. Companies. They should just get past the next fundraise, brother. No, like, maybe I'm like retard maxing, and Patrick definitely thinks I do. But like, I literally just think in like the next day, the next like— that's not a curse word, is it?

It is. It is.

It's very bad language. Yeah, yeah. Low class. That one—

Vulgar.

Never. Never say that one. But, um, no, but I get your point. You're just kind of like focused on the next —next time.

Yeah, the idea that I know what's gonna take place 5 or 10 or 20 years from now, I think's like—

I know, but I just think it'd be interesting, you know, you're sitting down for an interview with someone, you know, in 20 years, and if you can show them a note and say like, "Hey, the first time I met you, I thought you were, you know, special." The idea that I would keep anything for 20 years, like, I have almost no possessions, like, I don't, I don't like, I don't tend to like look back or like linger, like, I literally just think about the next 24 hours and design.

Like, did this 24— did I design a 24 hours I like? Cool. Let me do that again and again and again. I think one of the worst things I could have done, especially at the beginning of Founders when no one was listening, is just like, what's my 1-year plan? It's just like, I don't know. I'm going to make another podcast. And I've got to figure out how to get listeners and get better at doing this. And then just never stop doing that. I think time carries most of the weight. Like, this is one of the most, I think, like, recurring patterns when you're reading all these biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs. Yeah. —like, you have some of the smartest, most productive people who ever lived constantly getting the future wrong. And in many cases, like, just staying in the game long enough to get lucky. Just keep doing it over and over and over again, and trust in yourself that you'll figure it out, and you'll make the right decision. I mean, think about it. You guys have been around for, what, 17 months, right? And even in that short 17-month period—

You're counting closer than I am. Wow.

Right? Am I right or no?

I've not been able to say it all the time.

But yeah, it sounds right. So in that short 17-month period, you've probably made 10,000 little decisions about your business, 5,000, like, whatever the number is, it's a lot. And just these little ways— Henry Singleton, I guess, had the best way to put this. So, Henry Singleton is the guy that Warren Buffett said that it's a crime that schools, business schools, don't study him. Charlie Munger said that Henry Singleton was the smartest person he ever met.

Never heard of him.

Yeah. Are you serious?

Yeah.

Okay, Teledyne Corporation. It was a conglomerate back in like the '60s.

Did Singleton ever do a money spread?

Did he have chrome?

Yeah, do you know? Did he wear chrome?

I don't know. What is this? Chrome hearts?

No, I'm joking. But I said I don't know because I want you to explain.

So his whole thing was just like, he doesn't have a master plan. He's like, I like to come to work every day and steer the boat a little bit every day. And this guy was like— You know, again, Munger said he's the highest IQ person, smartest person he ever met. And he's just like, I don't have a grand plan. He's just like, I'm just gonna come to work and like make little adjustments every single day. I just know I'm gonna keep doing this for, you know, decade after decade. I think he ran his company for like 25 years or something like that.

Mm-hmm. Fun stuff. We have Jake Paul joining us in just a few minutes. He's running late.

Can you hang out for a bit?

Yeah, you want me to?

Yeah, hang out. Like, till we— till we get off? Yeah, for sure.

Sweet. Well, great catching up with you. We got to talk about the Shrek— the Shrukh. It's a Shrek-themed truck. They did it.

Love you.

It's breaking news. We got to cover it on the show. Let's pull up— can we pull up the Shrukh? This is important news. Everyone needs to know. We were talking about the GT3 RS from Porsche that is Buzz Lightyear themed. We were joking about a Shrek-themed Ferrari Luce, but it's It turns out that some entrepreneur, some enterprising young man on Instagram Reels created a Shrok. It's a Shrek-themed truck. And we have a video here in the timeline right after the GTA 6 cover art that was revealed earlier today. GTA 6, of course, is releasing November 19th, but let's play this video.

Marathon tonight?

I don't even need the IEMs. We can hear it. There you go. The Shrek. You want to watch Shrek tonight? Absolutely. The Shrek is going strong.

See, the ears are what make it.

Green truck doesn't do it until you put the ears on there. Look at that.

I might need to get one of these.

That's a good Malibu daily. I think you need it.

Just an everywhere daily.

Hey, we got Jake Paul. He's here. Come sit down. Jeff Woo too. How you doing?

Let's run it.

What's up? What's up?

Made it.

How are you?

Good to see you. Good to see you.

What's up, bro?

How are you?

Tell us the news. You raised a bunch of money.

Smack that golf.

100 million oversubscribed.

Woo! There we go. Wow, come on. Great to see you. Great to see you. Thanks for having us. Tell us about the fund. Who do you raise money from? Are you talking to endowments now? Are these your friends? Is it all your money? What's going on there? You're good.

Yeah, a lot of our own money. We have a 10%, maybe even more. It's like 10, 12, 13, 14% GP commit.

Cool.

Skin in the game.

Yeah, our lead investor is Aquarian Holdings. So, shout out to Rudy and Eric. They've believed in us for a long time. They doubled down into our growth fund, and it's been a great relationship with them. And then, yeah, just like other people that we know in our network. Highlights from the funds.

Sorry, I was gonna say like, I think going from more of just investing our own money, I think we are going more institutional, right? So Aquarian, they manage $27 billion plus as an insurance holding company. So I think we're just proving our sophistication as fiduciaries, as investors to be like, hey, endowments, institutions, we can compound money faster and better than other VCs can for you.

How is the strategy changing? What's changing with the new fund? Is it changing?

I think—

Like number of checks, check size, ownership, all that good stuff.

Yes, time has gone on. I think the barbell approach for us has been very successful. I think going big with bigger checks into growth stages in companies that we believe in with the best founders. You know, you don't bet against Palmer Luckey, Elon, Sam, Yeah. The big names like that and getting to fast DPI, you know, going into SpaceX and XAI, working with Jared Burchell to get into some of those rounds. And then, you know, you're liquid very quickly. And so I think that's very attractive in putting bigger checks into companies like that. And then on VentureOne, early stage, you know, and getting in, betting on founders from day one sometimes, and yet taking that more venture approach on that side of things. We've deployed our full Venture 1. This is our Growth 1, going into Venture 2 now, raising for that, and then pretty much fully deployed on Growth 1. We've been working on it for the past, you know, 8 months, getting into a lot of these big companies and actually going in into growth too already. And so we've just had tons of great access. And I think that's obviously the key. And just we're hustling and in all the right rooms providing marketing support, consultant support on that side of things, which a lot of these companies need. That's what we've realized in every room that we go into, whether it's, I mean, I won't say names, but pretty much everyone needs users.

Sure, yeah.

And so—

Distribution.

You'd be surprised surprised at the level of marketing knowledge that these companies have. It's like day one, very basic. These are the most technical companies in the world, right? But they're not the best at breaking through to grow their users. And so we've just been able to really help on that side of things. And the most basic 30-minute call about marketing is extremely helpful for these companies.

Yeah. Take us think through it, like, what are you actually talking to a tech company that might have their pitch dialed for investors or engineers?

Or even customers once they get them on a call.

Customers, but like, it's just that whatever story they're telling, it's not resonating with just the normal person. And I feel like you've gone so big with everything that you've done that you've touched every part of America, the world globally, and you can probably probably offer more feedback and advice on just like how to tell a story as a company that resonates outside of this tiny little enclave in San Francisco.

Yeah, no, correct. I mean, I went from Vine to then it was YouTube, then Facebook popped off, then Snapchat was the thing. Me and my brother were the first people making Snapchat stories, like a full content. Content. Evan Spiegel invites us out, asking us like how we like the app, what, what could we change in Venice. And then it went, um, you know, to all these different platforms— TikTok, Reels. So it's been however many years, like 14, 15 years of knowing exactly how to talk to the audience and be relatable and grow brands and my own brands from Better W anti-fund, MVP becoming the, the biggest boxing company in the last 4 years.

Mm-hmm.

And so I could do it from a personal side, but I also understand it from a corporate side. And I think a lot of the times, you know, these companies raise all this money, they have a big balance sheet, they're printing cash, and they get really corporate with their messaging and they want to create like a warm $1, $2, $3, $4 million commercial.

Mm-hmm.

And I think oftentimes that doesn't reach the audience. And so it's actually just a lot of times telling them to be more relatable and to scale down and to tell their story in an easier to understand way. And obviously I'm summarizing and it depends on like what the company is, right? We've helped companies market, you know, towards engineers because that, you know, they're maybe just an engineering product. And so it's like, how do we appeal to that side of things? So each case is, is different. But yeah, it's just second nature. And I think been pretty helpful.

Do you remember the first piece of content you ever created?

I was born on camera. Yeah. So my, my, and I didn't know that until like 2 years ago. My mom's like, look at this footage of you being born. I was like, oh great. You've never shown me this. Like, what are we doing, mom?

Like you didn't, this is a great part of the story. The whole influencer era, you know?

Yes. What about the first time, the first platform that you were on or the first series or the first, like the first content where you're like, okay, this is, I'm taking this seriously.

Yeah, I would say it was Vine. So I downloaded Vine the first day it came out. It was promoted through Twitter. I was like, oh, this is super interesting. And I just started making videos in like my cafeteria in school and just doing random stuff. I was like the class clown. I loved making videos. Me and my brother had been on YouTube before that, just messing around, cooking up edits with our video camera and posting it on YouTube. So we were naturally kind of like good at making the content. And when Vine came out, I thought it was super cool. I got to like 40 followers. Everyone in the high school was like, this is hilarious. Your videos are funny. Um, and then me and my brother got into an argument about like how to film a video. And I was like, bro, I have more followers than you. Like, shut up.

4 to 6 hours.

And I had like, yeah, 40 followers and he had like 20.

Bogged.

And I bogged him so hard that day. And that's what, that's actually what changed everything. 'Cause the next day he started like putting a ton of effort into his Vine videos. And I was watching him, I was like, oh, that was really good. Oh, oh, he's really doing this. And then he got to like 80 followers. I was at like 80. And then we just kept on putting more effort and like 2 weeks later, one of the videos that we made went viral. And once we tasted that success, we both gained like 5,000 followers. We were like, oh my gosh, we're famous. Like, this is it. We're the coolest people ever. Um, and once we figured out that recipe of like the level it took to make a viral video, we just kept on cranking that level out. Mm-hmm. And it just, one thing led to another. And once we realized we could make money from it, I got paid like $200 for my first brand deal. And I was landscaping. I had my own landscaping company and I was making $10 an hour. And I was like, $200 for a 6-second video?

You don't have to be in the hot sun.

Exactly. And that was the motivation to just like, take it even more serious.

Has the nature the competition between you and your brother changed?

Yeah, I think when we were younger, it was like very intense and still there. And we were just like young and it was actually good because there was no one else to compete with. We were the two biggest vloggers in the world. And so I was, it was inspiration and competition at the same time. And then as we've gotten older, We're just collaborative now and we're on the same team. Obviously, he's a general partner in Antifund and we work together on a lot of things and everything that he does benefits me and vice versa. And so, it's like building out a— we're the testosterone Kardashians essentially. It's just like— [LAUGHTER] Any given day of the week, you got to see one of our faces. Places somewhere.

The Kardashians of testosterone. How do you think about capacity? You've got a great partner in Jeff with Antifund, but multiple businesses, it feels like there's always some ceiling. Maybe you haven't found it yet, but yeah, what's the limit?

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, every year, I've just continued to compound since I was 16 years old. And I think it's just a testament to scale, team, having great partners on all different sides of the business and the best in class. From Gus, the best videographer in the world, to Laura and all these people around are just top notch. And I think that's, that's been a massive part of it. And then just continuing to, you know, see ahead and know where the ball is going. I think that's one of my best attributes is, is being a, a visionary and being able to pivot, move, change, um, adapt and continue to grow my career that way. But again, I think it just goes back to team and I'm inspired by people like Elon, where it's like, how do you have, you know, 4, 5, 6 of the biggest, some of the biggest companies in the world. I mean, obviously he's a machine and I don't stop. I work all the time around the clock and it's like, even if I'm doing something fun, I'm filming it to be posted as content. So like, it's just nonstop grind. Yeah. Grind for the past, you know, 14 years. And I just love hard work.

What's the future of boxing in America?

Yeah, that's an interesting category because it's not— you're going up against, you know, the biggest, the biggest names, the biggest balance sheets in the world competing over a market that historically hasn't been a monopoly, but maybe is, you know, there are some efforts to try to create a monopoly in that space.

Yeah, it's not gonna work, you know. I think so many people have tried to take over the sport of boxing, and it's just too diversified. Too many sanctioning bodies with the belts, too many fighters and promoters and managers involved. And it's a sport that is always gonna be, you know, scattered across across the board. And I think our strategy on that was essentially we're the WNBA of boxing.

Mm-hmm.

Because we've cornered a market in women's boxing and believed in Amanda Serrano since day one. And that was really the test case to say, okay, we can make a woman a massive star and take her from making $500 a fight to $5 million a fight. And no one is, pushing women's boxing. They deserve to be pushed. Their fights are arguably more entertaining, especially than Floyd Mayweather, for sure, without a doubt. [LAUGHTER] And we saw that and we were like, "All right, let's go after women's boxing 'cause it's untapped." And now we have, you know, 7 out of the 10 pound-for-pound best women fighters and 40 overall. Some of the best up-and-coming talent. And that's where we found a little bit of a niche, um, as well as being the leaders of working with Netflix. I think pay-per-view, there's so much piracy and so many issues with that. And so I was the first one to be like, all right, there was the TV era of boxing, then there was the pay-per-view pay-per-view era, and then I was like, now we're in the streaming era. And so realizing that we had to pivot the business model to be accessible, where it's like, if you have Netflix or one of these subscriptions, you're not gonna want— you don't care, you're gonna, you're gonna pay the $7 a month or $10 a month or whatever it is now. Um, and getting distribution that way. Obviously I'll probably still do pay-per-view fights here and there. But we're definitely moving into the streaming era of boxing.

How do you think the—

Mike Tyson fight broke Netflix, right?

Oh, yeah, it did, right? That literally broke the platform. For such a storied engineering team over there for decades.

How do you— how have you approached negotiating with platforms like a Netflix? What does your team look like for that?

Yeah, so my business partner and most valuable promotions. Nikita Vardaryan is one of the best negotiators in the world, but he was the CFO at UFC when they, they sold to Endeavor, and he helped lead the sale and was a pertinent part of their organization for many years.

And so you think Dana took that personally?

Oh yeah, that's, that's a whole big part of the beef. It's not just me. It's the fact that, yeah, Nikkisa and I have teamed up together. So, yeah, definitely a sore subject for Dana. And, yeah, I think it's just having the relationships and making the right fights at the right moments. And we've also, you know, put on amazing events and have great relationships with so many fighters. And so we're able to— to pull together the Ronda Rouseys, the Franciscan, the Nate Diazes, the, the Mike Perrys, because we've always been fighter first. So people love working with us. We came into the world that was— I, I say it was like taxi and we're Uber in the fight world. The way we run things is like a startup professional, treating fighters right. We're on time, we're paying instantly, all these little details, production, fighter kits, helping them, instant communication, social media tips, the list goes on. These things are all super basic to me and Nikisa, but in the fighting world, it's like fighters will fight and then not get paid for a year.

Mm-hmm, wow.

And just like, there's so many issues in the sport. So just by running it like a, proper SF startup. We've, amongst many other things, but we— that's where the— why we've been able to become the number one promoter in the sport in 4 years when a lot of these other people have been doing it for 30, 40, 50 years. I mean, Bob Arum, I don't even know, that guy's like 100 years old. He probably was alive when the T-Rexes were running around. So it's like just these Small little changes are why we've risen to the top.

How do you think the results of America 250 are gonna impact the UFC? On one hand, the Gaethje story of coming back from this really brutal knockout a couple years ago to then getting the belt is amazing, but at the same time, in the process, he took out a rising global superstar. Superstar. And so I can make an argument that it's good or bad for the UFC, but I'm wondering how you processed it.

Yeah, look, I think the event overall was great and great for fight sports in general. And it was such an entertaining show. So I think overall for all of MMA, it's a net positive. And I think it just depends how Ilia comes back, right? I mean, I think Conor McGregor has lost so many times, but his brand has, you know, stayed up there because he just keeps on fighting. He keeps on coming back. He keeps on trying. And so I think it's up to Ilia on that one. But yeah, Justin Gaethje is like overnight superstar legend. And we'll see, you know, how far he can go from here. At his older age, but overall—

Yeah, what's the mindset of a fighter that's rising through the ranks when you have a fight like Ilia just had? You're taking damage that's gonna probably stay with you in some capacity forever. Are fighters pretty acutely aware that at any point you could take a beating that like you, makes it a lot harder to come back from? I'm sure you've gone through—

Yeah, look, I think they're definitely aware of it. I think the thing is, is that they're just addicted to the sport and it's really all they know. And they're willing to sacrifice for that thrill and for that entertainment, for the love of the game. So, I don't think they necessarily care. And you know that going into the sport, that it's brutal and tough and rough on the body, and it's gonna affect your health potentially in the long run. I think people deal with the effects of injuries differently, but to each their own. And I think a lot of fighters know what they're signing up for.

How did you process enhanced games?

I always thought it was dumb.

Why? Why? It sounds like a good idea. You take something— Olympics is entertaining, you add steroids, fuel to the fire. Like, this is Jordi Hays' territory.

It's the best people in the world. Like, you could take something But the best people in the world are the ones who are the most dedicated to it for 20 years straight. So there's no replicating that 20-year dedication just because—

Yeah, you take somebody that's like 5th best in the world, which seems not that far away from number 1, and you give them all the PEDs, but the gap between 5 and gold is actually so big that you can get Give him, again, give him a horse worth of testosterone and it's not gonna make up the difference.

Yeah, no, and again, I believe that's what happened. I didn't watch it. I saw some clip-outs, but I heard the production was bad and that no one beat any records. And then I think— 'Til the very end. There was some, but there was some like people who weren't on PEDs that beat the runners, I don't know. But my fiancée is Olympic gold medalist and she was like, if anyone, she just won in Milan and she was like, if anyone tried to like do the enhanced games to beat her, like she was like, no one's beating me still.

Well, what about more broadly health maxing, looks maxing, pep tides. Do you have a take on the current trend?

Yeah, look, I think it's amazing, right? Like, you see today, you know, they just launched the new imaging, uh, yeah, Midjourney. Yeah, Midjourney. It's like the, the world we're living in is so exciting. And I've told my friends, you know, we met, we were in SF with, um, the Merge Labs guys, and Alex Blania was like, yeah, we're all going to live forever. Like, we're just gonna like transfer our mind into some robotic body. And so I think this whole like health wave—

Do you believe it?

Yeah, 1,000%.

You do?

Yeah, 100%.

Do you think that'll be good for the fight game? 'Cause I feel like there's a lot of insane athletes out there that would be incredible fighters, but they're just not willing to take that level, to make the sacrifice to take that level of damage. And if we can solve CTE and some of these other things, it could actually make the most violent sports harder.

I don't think so. I think if someone's afraid of getting hit in the first place, they're not gonna be a good fighter even if they transfer into a robotic body. But also, I don't think it'd be entertaining. I think I'm very long on traditional human sports in terms of a business model because the story is what matters and everyone's on the same playing field. So, when you put in like robots and all these perks and extra things and blah, blah, blah, I don't think people will enjoy it as much.

What's your timeline to a humanoid being able to beat you in boxing?

I'm sure very soon. I mean, bro, if I'm going up against a metal robot, like, I'd probably lose. So—

I know, but, but, but speed, speed matters.

The will, the human spirit.

Human spirit. You're long the human spirit.

Yeah, I think it can be able to do something on— There's no spirit. They just don't even feel the pain. It's just like straight-up robot. Yeah, it's like I, Robot in real life.

Yeah, yeah.

It's happening right now.

What about on the investing side? How much of your current thinking is like software-only singularity, invest in the token path, versus stuff like bio, health, defense tech, hardware, robotics, all the next-gen stuff that's maybe not product-market fit, not billion-dollar ARR yet, but interesting?

Yeah, I think it's really both, right? We're pretty AI maxis here. So we're in OpenAI and then going down that stack, right? So you go down the inference providers like the Modals.

Sure.

And then you go to semiconductors. We're in Etched, which is an inference ASIC.

Oh, yeah. I love Etched.

We just did Helion, which is a fusion company. So I think in some sense, I think that software game is going to be won by an OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, Google, maybe about cognition and some of these like—

Yeah, like the power law is being realized.

Yeah, 'cause I think there's just so much capital for just all the compute and all the models that are getting bigger and bigger. So I think, I mean, partly we're here to just visit El Segundo as well, right?

Oh, sure.

So I think it is like defense tech, robotics, manufacturing. I think getting to atoms is more and more important.

Going forward.

And then secondly, I think biocross AI is also very, very new. I think we're just texting with Sam Altman. He's like, yeah, we're like, it's still really early. Like he wasn't like, hey, there's like obvious like winners there yet. So I think in terms of like finding that next wave, I think that will be robotics, hardware, bio.

What about celebrity brands? What's your framework for a successful celebrity brand?

Yeah, I mean, I think we're not as excited around those often. I think it has to be like—

You're like, leave it to me, buddy.

Yeah, exactly. No, seriously. And yeah, I think it's, unless it's like the Kardashians or someone at that level, then it's, you know, very difficult. So we've been way more selective and then, you know, there's just way more, more upside on the tech and software side of things versus like CPG. And that's where we're spending our time, right? We're fiduciaries. So, at the end of the day, and for our own money. So, at the end of the day, it's like, where is time best spent? And that's really how we think about it.

I think to me, like, Celeb is just like a solve for distribution. But I think—

But it's not —because distribution is a flywheel.

It's a half-solved distribution. Distribution is not convert a million people over to this one time. It's how are you going to continue to grow and increase mass?

And hence, I think product is actually most important. I think choosing the right market and the right product is everything. Distribution is just gasoline on that fire. And then I think second, I think Jake is actually very special as a celeb entrepreneur, right? Like, his story of just like, like being a landscaper, right? I think a lot of celebrity folks that we've crossed paths with, they were really good at singing or dancing or playing a ball sport since they're like 13. So they never actually had to actually hustle their first brand deal, actually think about business.

Yeah, tell a story.

Or they're well known, but they don't have an owned audience, right?

Correct.

It's very different. It's very different, like somebody that's posted every single day for 15 years to launch a company.

I think that's why NFL players are very hard to cross over because one, their face is not even recognizable 'cause they're in helmets all the time. And then two, the NFL owns their distribution, right? NFL is their distribution channel. They don't have an audience that they're used to speaking towards on a daily basis. So I think the internet generation folks are interesting 'cause they own that distribution. I think I'm lucky to work with Jake 'cause I think Jake has the hybrid of both, right? Like he's mainstreamed on the Netflix platforms as a professional athlete and has a respect of actually being good at a craft and an art and a sport. Plus he comes with like a, what, like 200 million followers across different channels.

Yeah.

So I think that's where it's like an experiment for us where it's like, okay, we have a touch into mainstream, a touch into internet, I think there's also just like a hardcore capitalism heart that we're like, hey, how do we monetize the opportunity set?

Are haters a source of strength? We were talking to Alex Karp about this. He says all the AI leaders have only haters, no fans. And he was saying, I at least have fans. I have a lot of haters, but I have fans. Are haters a source of strength in the fullness of time? Time, are you glad you have both fans and haters?

Yeah, 100%. You know, I don't think anyone who does good things in this world or big things in this world doesn't have haters. I mean, it's the, it's the day one story. And I honestly, you know, since day one, uh, when I first went viral, the video I was talking about, like, I—

Cafeteria.

Yeah, instantly people in my school started hating. It's like, I don't even, I don't even remember life without—

Yeah, your mom, you know, took that video when you were born. I'm sure some of the nurses were like, yeah, this kid, they're like, yo, fuck this guy. Yeah, yeah.

No, you have to have it. And, you know, good news travels fast, bad news travels faster. And the, the haters actually will talk about you more and say bad things, but at the end of end of the day, people don't really remember what was said. They just remember your name and your face.

Mm-hmm.

And so you could do with that what you want. And it's really, they're adding to the algorithm at the end of the day. So it's really just math. And if you just have fans that are saying things, let's say that's 10,000 people, but add 10,000 haters in there and now 20,000 people are talking about you. And it just adds to clicks, views, talk, trending. So that's the way I've always looked at it. And yeah, the biggest and best people in the world all are also the most hated.

Ferrari Luce has a lot of haters. Will you be getting one?

Say it again?

The Ferrari Luce, new electric vehicle from Ferrari. Are you in the market?

No, no.

You gotta be careful 'cause if you want any of those haters, halo cars, this is going to be permanent.

This is permanent.

I know you might want an F80 at some point. You got to be really careful. I just want you to be really careful with this.

This is a political answer. No comment.

OK.

That shit's ass. No comment. No comment. No comment.

Oh, well. It was a lot of fun. Well, thank you so much for coming on, Dan.

Yeah, congrats on the new fund.

Congrats, thank you.

Have fun down in El Segundo. Hopefully, We give our best to everyone. That's pretty good. The South Bay, I'm sure you guys are gonna be spending a lot of time there post-SpaceX IPO. It's just gonna be more and more action.

Let me close out by telling everyone about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We were off for a couple days. We'll see you back at 11:00 next week.

Is an IPO like on the—

It can happen.

We got some ideas of things. We're cooking, dog.

We're cooking.

Flashbang out, leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com, and thank you for tuning in today. Goodbye.

Nice. Perfect.